


In These Frozen and Silent Nights

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Caught in the Act, Friends to Lovers, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Oral Sex, Pining, Sharing a Bed, Snowed In, Truth or Dare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 10:33:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15661458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: “You know me,” Shane says, “I love a good cabin. I’m a cabinhead.”“I’ll show you cabin head,” Ryan rebuts without thinking, and then he turns his face into the pillow to stifle a nervous snicker. “Oh shit, wait, that’s—”Planning a shoot at a remote cabin in Vermont the week before Christmas wasn't Ryan’s best-ever idea. Taking a leisurely walk in a blizzard wasn't Shane’s. Scrap the ep, there’s a new plan: survive the storm, stay warm, try not to kill each other, and figure some shit out along the way.





	In These Frozen and Silent Nights

**Author's Note:**

> It’s been an unbearably hot summer and all I can think about is being cold again, and also what Ryan Bergara’s back muscles might look like rippling in front of a roaring fire. If you are Ryan Bergara, or someone with the opportunity to see his back muscles in real life, there is therefore no reason for you to be here. I urge you to click away now. 
> 
> Big ups to my Discord pals for helping me brainstorm snowed-in activities, and particularly for the revelation that Shane would definitely do puzzles wrong just to be That Guy. 
> 
> This fic was also inspired by [this glorious decade-old TripAdvisor review](https://imgur.com/a/nvGebp0) that I think about a lot. “Looks nice but we felt it is haunted,” what a mood. 
> 
> Song title’s from “2000 Miles,” a wildly underappreciated holiday song [originally by The Pretenders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SkWIqQ3oLY). I am also partial to Mark Kozelak’s cover.

_*_

**December 18, 2017, 4:25 pm. Somewhere in the woods outside Stowe, Vermont.**

“I can’t feel my toes. We’re going to die out here, aren’t we?  They’re going to find us out here in a week or a month or whatever, all picked over by vultures, and then jump cut to ten years from now when someone’s doing an Unsolved ep about _us_.”

Ryan’s been going on like this for some time now. Shane’s not sure how much time has elapsed since Ryan well and truly began to panic, but it’s been at least half an hour.

Shane’s not ready to admit that they’re lost, but he’s also forced to concede that they’re not _not_ lost.

“And people always take their clothes off when they get hypothermia, did you know that? So they’re going to say it was weird sex cult stuff. They will.”

“Shut up, Ryan. Let me think. We’re probably not going to die but I just, I need a minute.”

“I can’t help it, I’m going insane, this is _snow madness._ If you die first I am going to cut you open and huddle inside your body for warmth like a Tauntaun.”

“Sounds like something a sex cultist would say, but I’m glad you have a solid plan B.” Shane looks around, trying to get his bearings in the swirling snow. The world around them is all white; he can barely make out the trees on either side of the path, and those are mere feet in front of his face. “You’re thinking of snow blindness, by the way. Not madness.”

“That sounds even worse!” The way Ryan’s voice cracks on the ‘worse’ is audible even over the howl of the wind. Ryan is good at a great many things, but no one would argue that keeping his cool under pressure is one of those things.

Shane grabs Ryan by the wrist and plops Ryan’s gloved hand on the back of his own jacket. Even through the layers he feels the surprised flex of Ryan’s hand on his shoulder blade.

“Hold on to me,” Shane says. “Like this. And whatever you do, don’t fucking let go. If we lose each other out here we’re done.”

Ryan’s usually so detail-oriented when he plans the Unsolved shooting trips, is the thing. He books the flights himself instead of getting an intern to do it; he gets all the hotel rooms on Priceline to make the budget stretch as far as it can. He makes a list of everybody’s favorite snacks to buy for car trips, for fuck’s sake. Shane’s not sure what’s gone wrong this time around.

He does a quick mental run-through of the entire catalogue of bad decisions they’ve made to bring them here, freezing and panicking under a canopy of winter-barren sugar maples.

He doesn’t want to be an alarmist, but also he’s fucking _alarmed_.

*

**The previous day.**

“So why Vermont?” Shane asks as they’re getting settled on the plane, tucking his phone and wallet into the seat pocket, trying to contort his too-long legs into the too-small legroom allowed him. “Not that I’m complaining. Festive, you know, for the holiday season.”

It’s a week until Christmas, and Shane’s already half checked-out. After the shoot he’s got a flight booked to Chicago, and he’s going to spend a whole two weeks of accumulated PTO binge-watching Netflix and shoving his mom’s cooking into his face. If he doesn’t come back five pounds heavier it won’t be for lack of trying.

“Haunted cabin,” Ryan says, clicking his seatbelt into place. “Real murdery. You’ll like it.”

“Because that is what I look for in a vacation rental. Gotta be murdery. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked into an Air B&B and been like, no thank you, sir, your home is lovely but not _nearly_ cursed enough.”

Ryan slaps his chest and laughs, a delighted ringing peal that makes the people across the aisle turn and look.

“Three stars, very clean, host was great, not enough recently-departed souls clinging to every surface.”

“Wi-Fi was strong, but unfortunately walls did not seep blood,” Shane adds.

Ryan snorts and rests his head back against the headrest. He pulls out his phone to scroll through it, and then he pulls up a picture from his email and shows it to Shane.

“See? Cabin. It’s outside Stowe, so I hope you brought your skis.”

“Do I look like the kind of person who would be good at skiing?” Shane asks, motioning down at his legs, cramped in their airplane prison. “Imagine seeing this barreling down a mountain at you full-tilt.”

The cabin doesn’t look haunted to Shane, even grading on the extreme curve by which Shane judges their shoot locations: ten being Waverly, one being the Dauphine Hotel, a boutique hotel where they had to set up little cordons so the tourists wouldn’t stumble into the shot. The cabin’s maybe a three, and that’s being generous.

It’s just…a cabin. A little run-down, at least on the outside, but it must still be open for rental because the picture’s been grabbed from a booking site.

“It doesn’t look that murdery,” Shane says, scrolling down. There are pics of the inside, too, and it looks like your standard woodland cabin, with a big stone fireplace and piles of wool blankets everywhere. “It’s cozy as hell.”

“Just you wait,” Ryan says, adjusting his ballcap on his head and pulling it down over his eyes to try to nap. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”

*

By the time they land in Burlington and pick up their rental car, after a long layover in Detroit, it’s too late to head up to Stowe. They get a couple of rooms at an airport hotel for the night, and then the next morning, early, they drive in.

Stowe’s a picturesque ski resort town, but it’s awfully quiet for the week before Christmas. “It’s a g-g-g-ghost town!” Shane says as Ryan navigates the car through abandoned streets, past a church with a magnificent white steeple and a wreath on the door.

They pick up the keys to the cabin from an elderly, vague old man who repeatedly calls Ryan “Raoul” despite their many previous conversations, while Shane tries not to make eye contact with TJ or Mark or risk burst out laughing. Then they go to a nearby grocery store to grab some food for the four of them for the cabin, which is just far enough away that it would be annoying to have to come back into town for lunch or dinner.

The grocery store is _packed._ As soon as Shane sees the parking lot he realizes why all the other roads in this town are dead; it’s because everybody’s here.

“Local party spot?” he asks, and Ryan merely shrugs as he pulls into one of the last available parking spaces. “Look, I grew up in a town where the only place open after ten is Wal Mart, so I get it. But this is ridiculous.”

They get in the store and it’s a total madhouse, people rushing everywhere with carts full of pallets of bottled water and canned foods.

“Hang on, I know this,” Mark says, swiveling around to face the group with a sudden intensity that isn’t like him at all. “This is storm panic.”

“What storm?” Shane asks. He’s uneasy, maybe because he isn’t accustomed to Mark making sudden movements and maybe because he can see Ryan’s shoulders are ratcheted up almost to his ears.

All eyes turn to Ryan.

“There’s no storm!” he says. “I checked the weather myself. I checked it, like, less than a week ago, and—”

Mark groans and TJ starts swearing to himself, a low continuous mutter of profanity the likes of which Shane has rarely heard. Ryan goes a little pale around the mouth.

“I hate to bug Devon when she’s with her family, but I’m going to go outside and give her a quick ring.”

He comes back a few minutes later, looking grim. Devon’s told him that there is indeed a winter storm warning in effect for that night, but that they’re saying it might veer and miss them altogether. It could be a foot of snow or none, and it’s impossible to tell which way it’ll go.

“She says it’s our call, but we’ve already come all this way. I say we go for it,” Ryan says. “Shane?” He looks to Shane, and Shane knows he could pull out his veto and Ryan would respect it. He could get to Chicago a couple of days early, relax, see his family.

On the other hand, Ryan’s got this goofy, hopeful look on his face, and Shane doesn’t want to be the one to rain on his parade. He also loves a good cabin, and it’s hard to resist the chance to escape to nature for a whole day and night even if it is for work. And if the grocery store’s this bad the airport will be a joke.

“Let’s do it,” Shane says. And then, like a fucking dupe, like he’s never seen a disaster movie or horror flick before: “It’ll be fine. What’s the worst that could happen?”

They join the jostling crowds, throwing things in the cart willy-nilly: sandwich fixings, some cans of soup, assorted snack foods, stuff for breakfast, and popcorn at Ryan’s insistence. They pick up a couple of six-packs of beer and, because TJ looks so nervous, a couple of pallets of bottled water and some spare batteries for their flashlights. It’s not a full stockpile, but it’ll feed four people for a few days in a pinch.

Then they load it all up in the rental car and make their way out to the cabin. They’re in the car for at least a half an hour, on roads that are increasingly windy and uphill. Shane can feel TJ’s hands drumming on the back of his seat, a steady tap-tap-tap that means he’s not thrilled about how remote they’re getting.

 Shane rather agrees.

“Bit out of the way, isn’t it?” he asks Ryan as Ryan consults the GPS on his phone again and makes a sudden hard left turn onto a little two-lane road that barely qualifies as paved.

“Yeah, I told you it would be spooky. I’m not messing around with this one,” Ryan says, like it was a compliment, and he’s clearly missing the implication. Shane remembers that Ryan’s a California guy born and raised. He doesn’t know enough to be nervous.

*

They get to the cabin, and it’s more or less what the photos promised. Ryan doesn’t seem to be spooked by it yet; in the light of day it’s just a cabin like any other you might rent for a skiing weekend or a honeymoon retreat.

They unpack the car, put the food in the fridge, and take their stuff to the bedrooms—Shane and Ryan to the main floor master suite, for the purposes of overnight filming, and Mark and TJ to the second bedroom up in the loft where they can stay out of the way for the cameras and maintain the illusion that they aren’t here. As he watches them climb the stairs with their bags, Shane asks, “So did people get murdered up there, then?”

“Oh yeah. Big time.”

“And down here?”

“For sure. Good luck finding a room in this cabin nobody’s been murdered in, man.  Place is bound to be crawling with spirits.” Ryan’s freaked out when he says it, but also delighted.

He’s come a long way since the early days, when he’d be scared shitless by any allegedly haunted location regardless of what they found—or didn’t find—when they arrived. Now Shane knows that what Ryan sees first is the episode stretched out before him, ready to be formed and shaped on the fly, full of potential he wants to get his hands on. The fear is there, but it’s secondary to excitement.

They head outside to get some establishing shots of the exterior and to film Shane and Ryan walking into the cabin. They don’t get a chance to do much more than stand around shivering, though, because Mark is frowning and fiddling with the camera.

“It won’t turn on,” he says, pressing buttons. “I think the battery’s dead.”

“Can we use the backup?” TJ asks, concerned.

“This _is_ the backup. The primary was dead too, when we got here, and it wasn’t holding a charge when I plugged it in.”

“Wait, what?” Ryan asks, catching on that there’s trouble. Shane has this inexplicable sense of a domino falling, setting something into motion. Another little thing going wrong, in the shape of something bigger.

They strategize, but there’s nothing for it. They’ll lose the whole day of filming if they wait for this battery to charge. In the end they decide that TJ and Mark will drive back into town to buy a new battery. It’s not yet noon, so there should still be enough daylight to get the shots they need.

Later, Shane can identify this as the “don’t split up” moment: the moment in a suspenseful movie where the group decides they can cover twice as much ground if they split up to investigate, and the audience—who knows better—groans into their popcorn.

“Man, the sky looks crazy,” Ryan says, leaning against the railing of the cabin’s front porch to watch the car drive away down the long lane, Mark driving as fast as TJ will let him. Shane eyes the sky speculatively. It’s fully clouded over, pure white, and the clouds are moving fast as the wind picks up.

“There’s a word for that,” Shane says.  He licks his finger and holds it up into the freezing air, because he’s seen people do that in movies. Ryan stares at his finger, head cocked. “Harbinger.”

“What?”

“See also: portent. See also: omen.”

“Remind me to never play Scrabble with you.”

Tiny flakes of snow start to fall, unthreatening and unassuming. If they stick, Shane doesn’t notice.

*

Looking back, Shane can’t remember for certain whose idea it is to take a walk. It might have been his, because Ryan’s antsy waiting for the guys to get back, and when Ryan gets antsy he becomes an impossible thing. Shane has this idea that wearing him out with a walk, like you would a high-energy dog, might make everybody’s lives easier later.

Ryan had said the storm wasn’t expected until tonight.

Whoever’s idea it is, they bundle up in their coats and gloves and warm socks and set off. The snow is falling a little heavier now, just enough to lend the place an air of serene magnificence. It really is beautiful; their cabin is situated partway up a small mountain, and larger mountains rise up in the near distance, snow-capped and peaceful.

It’s about as different from Southern California as you can get, and sometimes that’s what Shane needs.

It’s dead silent, too, if you don’t count Ryan muttering to himself, and Shane’s so used to it that he barely does anymore. There may not be another person for miles, besides the two of them, and his heart gives a birdlike swoop of delight at the near-solitude.

There’s a path out the back of the cabin that slopes upwards, and Ryan leads them up it. The woods get dense fast, and when they arrive at a fork they take a left to keep ascending. Shane takes two twigs and lays them in an X across the base of the tree at the fork, a little signpost. Just in case.

They take a few more forks, and each time Shane lays an X to mark their way. Ryan doesn’t even make fun of him for it; he huffs out breath to make the air in front of his mouth fog up, stamping his feet to make sure Shane knows he’s cold and annoyed about it.

They’ve only been walking about twenty minutes when the snow starts to pick up, faster and heavier than it should. Shane doesn’t even notice it happen at first. He’s staring unseeing at his feet, letting his brain relax like a muscle, and when he looks up the world around them is all white.

“Time to head back,” he says, with an air of deliberate casualness. _This may have been a mistake_ , he doesn’t say. Ryan’s head snaps up, lost in his own thoughts too, and he seems as surprised as Shane to see the way the snow’s accumulating. Shane’s more worried about the wind; it’s starting to whip the snow around in dramatic swirls as it falls, obscuring everything like a blur filter.  

“Good, I’m freezing my balls off anyway,” Ryan says. “Lead the way.”

The flaw in Shane’s little branch-laying plan is immediately obvious: he’d been counting on being able to _see_ them, on at least a few more hours of easy visibility. He also hadn’t expected the snow to start piling up quite so fast, to the point where not only the path but also the bases of the trees are covered already.

“It looks like we might get hit with that winter storm, doesn’t it?” Ryan says, making conversation as they pick their way back downhill in what Shane is almost certain is the right direction.

“ _Might get_ —Ryan. Look around, man. It’s not a winter storm, it’s a blizzard, and we’re about to be in it.”

Ryan’s eyes go very wide.

In retrospect, Shane could have found a gentler way to say this, but he’s starting to get nervous and he doesn’t want to have to shoulder the burden of keeping quiet about it.

“We’re fine,” Shane says. “It’s fine. We’ll just keep heading downhill. And anyway, TJ and Mark will be back soon, if they aren’t already, and they’ll come looking for us.”

*

An hour and a half later, things are looking dire. Ryan’s long past the point of useful contribution, both because he’s frozen near-solid and because he doesn’t have the benefit of Shane’s height. The snow’s past the middle of his shins already, and staying upright while he trudges through it is taking just about all the energy he has. He’s also past the point of chattering, and Shane misses the stream of steady talk.

“We’ve passed it for sure,” Shane says with a frown. “We have to either go left, and hope we hit the cabin, or right, and hope we hit the road.”

“It’s gonna be dark soon,” Ryan says, pulling his phone out to stare at it again and almost fumbling it into the snow. Shane can barely see the glow of it through the white. There’s no signal out here, not much even at the cabin, but they’ve been trying every few minutes anyway. “And then Mark and Teej will never find us.”

“I hope they knew better than to try,” Shane says, and then Ryan’s hand clutches and pulls at the back of his jacket as he stumbles.

“Sorry,” Ryan mumbles around his zipped-up coat. “Feet’re cold. Everything’s cold.” 

They don’t have waterproof winter boots on, just their ghoul-stomping boots, and Shane’s starting to worry about the growing dampness he can feel at his heels. About toes, and fingers, and noses. They didn’t come prepared to be trekking around in weather, and Shane’s clothes are soaked through.

“Well at least we’ll die Boot Bros,” Shane says, and Ryan starts to laugh, and then Shane laughs too and they’re clutching at each other’s’ shoulders in the middle of a blizzard and howling. It feels so good to hear Ryan laugh that Shane gets a second wind, a little burst of optimism that he’s going to put to good use.

“Okay, let’s go left,” he decides. The road might be easier to find, but it won’t do them much good if they can’t take it anywhere warm.

They plod on for another ten minutes, and Shane’s starting to suspect he’s made another wrong call in an escalating series of wrong calls when they get _unbelievably_ lucky. The snow eases up, just for a moment, enough for Shane to spot a dim glow perhaps fifty yards ahead. It could be a light.

Either that, or the first stages of hypothermia have set in and he’s starting to hallucinate, a thirsty man spotting a mirage in the desert.

But Ryan must see it too, because he’s tugging on Shane’s jacket again, on purpose this time.

“Shane! Cabin?” he yells over the wind, too exhausted to speak in full sentences.

They make a beeline for the light, plowing through snow that’s well on its way up Shane’s shins now, and when they hit the little porch of the cabin he’s so relieved he could cry.

*

They fall through the door of the cabin, and Mark and TJ are not there. What’s more, the camera’s not on the table with their other equipment, which means they never made it back from town.

Shane will worry about that later. For now, he starts peeling of his wet things, untying his boots with pink, stiff fingers and kicking them off into a corner. He strips down to his underwear, too cold to be embarrassed, and throws a blanket around himself. Ryan’s still just standing there in the little living room of the cabin, dazed, looking at Shane but not seeing.

Shane hesitates for only a minute, and then he kneels down to start in on Ryan’s boots too. Ryan’s hands fly to Shane’s shoulders, bracing himself as Shane nudges his boots off his frigid feet one at a time. Ryan’s socks are _very_ wet.

As businesslike as he can, Shane unzips Ryan’s coat and pulls it off him, tugs off his gloves carefully, and examines Ryan’s fingertips. They’re freezing cold but they’re pink too, which seems like a good sign, and when he pinches one of them between his thumb and forefinger the skin goes pale and then pinks up again.

“Good news, you’ll live to jerk off another day,” Shane says, which rouses Ryan from his stupor a little bit.

“You’re gross,” he says. “I’m okay, I’ve just, I’ve never been this cold. It _hurts_.”

“Such a delicate California flower. Okay, take your—can you get your jeans off? Do you need me to, um…?”

Ryan struggles with the button on his jeans, fumbling with fingertips he can’t feel and making a little frustrated noise when he can’t get it. Shane steels himself, wishing he hadn’t just made a joke about jerking off. He reaches down to slide the button through the hole and unzip Ryan’s jeans for him, wincing when his hand gives an unsteady tremble.

“Sorry,” Shane apologizes, helping him peel them off his legs. Ryan shakes his head. Finally freed, he falls back on the couch, letting Shane help him tug his shirt, damp with snow and sweat, over his head. He pulls another blanket from the back of the couch and huddles under it.

Shane turns his attention to Ryan’s feet, which isn’t something he ever thought he’d be doing, but here he is. He pulls the socks past his heels and off as gently as he can, but Ryan hisses anyway.

“Does this hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“I think that’s good, it means the blood’s getting back where it needs to go. Better pain than numbness.”

The skin by his toes is paler than Shane would like, though, and Ryan’s still shivering all over, like he can’t get warm.

“Okay, shower. Right now,” he says, pulling Ryan back up from the couch. He doesn’t have any real medical knowledge to speak of and he doesn’t have the cell service to Google anything, but he read somewhere that in cases of frostbite or hypothermia you’re supposed to reheat with warm water.

Shane hustles Ryan into the master bathroom and makes him sit on the side of the tub while he gets the water temperature about right. He helps Ryan into the shower, clad only in his boxer briefs, and then he hesitates. He’s not sure what the limit is here, afraid he’ll trip over the invisible line between concerned friend and creepy shower lurker. 

“Are you gonna be okay in there alone?” he asks.

“Probably,” Ryan says over the clatter of the water. “God, this feels so good.”

“No, not probably. Yes or no?”

“I’m not a baby, Shane. I can stand in the shower.  Believe it or not, sometimes I do it all by myself for stretches of ten or fifteen minutes at a time.”

“I know you’re not a baby. Your body just doesn’t have a baseline for this kind of cold. I’m worried about your feet,” Shane says. That pale, cold skin. The stumbling.

“The minute I can get Twitter to load I’m telling the whole world how you ruined our friendship with your foot fetish,” Ryan says, and Shane feels the involuntary laugh whoosh out of him, temporarily crowding out his worry. “Get in.”

“What?”

“Get in, it’s a shower party. The water’s already cooling off, and you’re freezing too.”

Shane climbs in the shower, which feels very small for two people who do not want to be in a shower together. He’s much too big to share this space, too much limb and nowhere to put it all. He’s never been in a shower in his underwear before, and the way the wet cotton’s sticking to his skin is somehow making him feel more naked rather than less.  

Ryan looks a lot better already, more alert and moving around naturally again. He stands for a minute or two under the stream of the water, letting it fall on his head. Shane has to look away from him because the expression on his face is so _open_ , blissed-out and exhausted.

“Okay, your turn.”

It’s awkward while they negotiate around the shower so Shane can get under the spray. There’s a moment where he almost slips and Ryan’s hands shoot out to grab him at the hips, steadying him with a strong grip, newly-warm fingers navigating him into the path of the showerhead. For the first time it all feels, well, not clinical. Not sexual either, but— _intimate_.

He’s acutely aware that 2016 Ryan would not have allowed this to happen; that the Ryan of even a year ago would have collapsed in the shower or risked losing a toe before touching him like this.

He’s not sure what that means, if anything. Maybe Ryan’s just growing up, growing into his own, learning to give fewer fucks. Maybe he’s just too shell-shocked to care.

The shower head’s a little low—he has to duck under it—but he’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. All the way under the spray, the warm water feels so amazing on Shane’s stiff neck that he lets out a little groan of appreciation.

Ryan coughs.

“So we’re never telling anybody about this,” he says.

“God no. But I hope your ghosties are watching and that they’re proper scandalized.” Ryan’s eyes widen and dart to the shower curtain, like he’s expecting a knife to come plowing through, Psycho-style. “Oh no, you forgot about the ghost thing, didn’t you?”

“I was kind of preoccupied with the almost freezing to death thing,” Ryan mutters.

He’s got his arms crossed over his chest, leaning back against the far wall of the shower, little droplets of water making their way down his face and neck in rivulets. He looks like a muscular cat that fell in the tub and isn’t happy about it.

“Okay,” Shane says, turning off the water. “Clothes, and blankets, and food. And then—ugh—I need to look at your feet again.”

“You creep!” Ryan howls, but he lets himself be helped out of the shower.

*

Once they’re dry and dressed, and Ryan’s situated on the couch under a heavy wool thing that must have required about a hundred sheep to make, Shane roots around in the fridge. They should have plenty of food now that it’s only the two of them, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

He makes them both a sandwich, loads their plates up with chips, and grabs two beers. On the way back into the living room he swings by the big bay window and squints out into the darkness, but he can’t see anything. The insulation isn’t great, and he gets a blast of cold air through the glass.

He can tell the storm’s still going strong because he can hear the wind whistling, the occasional patter of ice against the roof.

“Here, eat,” he says, handing Ryan his plate. “Extra mustard, like you like.”

“My hero,” Ryan says, and he might not be being sarcastic, judging by the way he shovels the sandwich into his mouth like a starving man.

As Shane eats, he picks up his phone to scroll through on a reflex.

“Holy shit, a voicemail. It’s Teej.” His stomach turns over, just once, threatening to upend itself. His worry for Mark and TJ has been simmering at a low boil, crowded out by more immediate concerns, but lurking in the back of his head the whole time. _What if they went out to look for us. What if their car crashed._

He dials his voicemail, hoping Ryan won’t notice that his hands are shaking. He must notice, though, because he nudges Shane’s calf with his blanket-covered foot.

“Hey Shane, it’s TJ, hope you get this. This is the first time I’ve managed to get either of your voicemails, so that’s a good sign. Um, Mark and I weren’t able to make it back to the cabin, the roads got bad fast. We’ve managed to get a room at one of the resorts, so we’re fine for food and stuff—”

His voice cuts out for a minute, goes quieter, like he’s pulled his mouth from the receiver to say something muffled to Mark.

“Anyway, the bad news is that I think it’s going to be a while. Looks like it’ll be a few days before anybody can get up there safely to dig you guys out. So, um, hang tight, and I’ll try to call again or send you an email. Tell Ryan hi.”

Shane puts the phone down. A couple of days is…not great. He performs a quick mental inventory of the food, the bottled water, the batteries, the blankets. If they lose power they’ll be uncomfortable, but they’ll live.

“Everything okay?” Ryan asks. “Where are they?”

“Still in Stowe, the storm got bad too fast and they couldn’t get back. He says we might be stuck here for a few days.”

“A few _days_?” Ryan’s face falls. “There isn’t even a TV here.”

“He said it’s pretty bad.” A thought occurs to Shane. “We should put our body cams on. Maybe you’ll get that sweet, sweet evidence, now that we’re here for the duration.”

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Ryan says, and Shane has to laugh

“Oh my God. You keep forgetting this is a murder cabin, don’t you?”

Shane knows he should be disappointed that he’ll miss his flight to Chicago, have to delay his holiday plans a little. Spending multiple days cooped up with Ryan was not quite what he had in mind for this last week before Christmas. On the other hand, there’s beer in the fridge, he’s got a couple of good books in his bag, and there’s something to be said for the pleasure of watching Ryan’s brain leak out his ears.

Now that it’s looking like everybody’s going to keep their toes, a man could do worse.

*

“Dude. Dude, I’m bored.”

Shane looks up from his book and consults his watch. It’s been less than an hour.

“I’ve got other books if you want to borrow one.”

“One of your nerd books? No thank you. Tell me a story.”

“Tell you a—Ryan. Are you going to be like this the whole time?”

“You know I am.”

Shane closes his book with a sigh. Ryan’s got his pay-attention-to-me face on and he’s not going to let Shane have any peace until he gets what he wants.

“I should have left you in a snowdrift to die. They’re not nerd books, they’re _good_ books. They don’t have any very hungry caterpillars in them so they’re a little above your reading level, but I can help you sound out the big words.” 

“Fuck you, I read!”

“Articles about basketball on _The Ringer_ don’t count. Why don’t you tell me a story instead?” Shane says. He nods at the body cameras, sitting over on the little kitchen table. “Tell me about this place. Tell me why we’re here, and we’ll film it. We might not be able to get an ep out of this fiasco, but you never know.”

They film it just like that, sitting on the couch under blankets, sipping their beers. Sometimes the wind’s so loud Shane thinks the footage might not even be usable. Ryan tells him about the cabin’s history—how a whole family of four, mom and dad and two kids, was found murdered here in the 1950s. How they never caught the guy who did it, never even had a good lead (spoiler alert: Ryan thinks it _might_ have been aliens). About the writer who came here to finish his novel in the ‘80s, only he killed himself instead.

“Told you it was murdery. That old guy bought it and refurbed it in the nineties, and ever since then people have reported creepy stuff happening here.”

“Ah, but the suicide was an unexpected treat. Like a little after-dinner mint.”

“Writer’s block will get you every time.”

Ryan’s hair is falling in his face, soft and product-free from the shower. Shane has the unfamiliar urge to reach out and brush it back and out of his eyes, but he’s self-conscious, and conscious of the cameras. Even if Ryan doesn’t register it as strange—and he might not, today, after everything—the cameras will.

It’s not yet nine o’clock, but they used up a lot of energy trekking around in the deepening snow. Shane realizes the instant Ryan yawns into his blanket that what he must be feeling is pure exhaustion. His thigh muscles ache.

“Sleep?” he asks Ryan, and Ryan nods through another yawn.

Because there’s no camera and no tripod, there’s no need for them to share a room. Shane takes the downstairs bedroom and Ryan the upstairs one; should they lose power in the night, the rising heat will keep the upstairs warmer for longer. He doesn’t tell Ryan that’s the reason, though.

Shane lies there, letting the wind in the trees outside lull him to sleep. In the moment he’s glad for the storm; without it, it would be so very quiet.

*

Shane wakes up some indeterminate amount of time later to a light knock at his door. Then the door creaks open a fraction.

His mostly-asleep brain thinks, for the splittest of seconds: _ghost?!_ Then he hears Ryan’s voice, a whisper from across the room.

“Shane. Hey. Shane. Are you awake?”

“I am now,” he says, trying not to sound grumpy. And then he remembers where they are, what happened today—yesterday? “Are you okay?”

“I can’t sleep. There are a lot of noises upstairs.”

“Noises, like storm noises? Ghost noises?”

“Just noises. I keep hearing splashing. Like something’s playing in the tub.”

One of the first things they had done earlier in the evening after getting TJ’s voicemail was to fill the upstairs tub with water, so they can still flush the toilets if they lose power.

“What time is it?” Shane asks, rolling over. He can just make out Ryan’s form in the doorway, backlit by the single light they left on in the kitchen, above the oven.

“Two in the morning. Ish.”

Shane can’t get too worked up about it; he’s too sleepy, too comfortable. He pulls back the blankets of the bed on the side nearest to the door and rolls over to make room. It’s not a huge bed, a double rather than a queen size, but they’ve slept in worse.

“Okay, get in.”

He half expects Ryan to hem and haw about it, to put up some kind of token resistance even though this was clearly why he came downstairs in the first place. But Ryan doesn’t; he clambers into the bed and under the covers without hesitation, fluffing the pillow and settling in with a sigh.

Shane rolls back over, facing the wall. He’s almost asleep again, when—

“Shane?”

“Hmm?”

“That was a close call today,” Ryan whispers, and he doesn’t sound quite like himself. He sounds scared, and weary with it. Usually Ryan’s fear, though never faked, comes with an element of performance. It comes with shrieking and jumping and it plays for laughs on camera. This isn’t that.

“Yes. It was.” Shane doesn’t know what else to say, what Ryan’s looking for from him here. He won’t deny it, because it _was_ a close call; but he also doesn’t want to talk about it, because they were probably an hour away from frostbite and a few hours away from worse and examining that too closely makes him nauseated.

When he tells people this story later—his parents, his coworkers, his friends—he’ll leave that part out, soften the edges so it’s just about two city boys bumbling around the wilderness, ha ha, _save the ghosts the trouble of murking us!_ But Ryan will always know how very bad it almost was, how wrong it went and how quickly.

Shane wants to reach out for Ryan, across the bed, and—he doesn’t know what, exactly. Touch him, maybe, or. If they were standing and not in a bed he’d go in for a hug, but when you’re in a bed a hug is _cuddling_ and that doesn’t feel right either.

“Thank you for…” Ryan says, trailing off. “I—I wasn’t a lot of help out there today. If I had been alone,” and he breathes in, a sharp, tight little breath, and doesn’t finish the thought.

“Shut up, you were plenty of help,” Shane says. “I’d have given up if you weren’t there. And we wouldn’t have been out there at all if it wasn’t for me.”

“You would have gotten back quicker, you Yeti,” Ryan mumbles, barely coherent, into his pillow. “You’re the Abominable from Rudolph, snow is your natural habitat.”

“Ryan.” Shane’s still not sure what this is, where this is coming from. “I would never have left you in a snowdrift to die. You do know that, right? I’d have died in a snowdrift with you first. Package deal.”

Ryan doesn’t say anything more. He just reaches out into the darkness between them and rests a blessedly warm hand on Shane’s upper arm. This is something else he would never have done, before. Their shared fear and relief have redrawn the boundaries of their friendship a little, and Shane wants to press out with his fingers and feel for the new edges.

He falls asleep with Ryan’s hand on him, and when he wakes up in the morning Ryan’s already gone.

*

“I made waffles,” Ryan says proudly when Shane shuffles into the kitchen. “There was stuff for waffles and I found a big old waffle maker in one of the cupboards, so I made waffles. There was a recipe on the box, I hope they’re okay. Hey, your hair looks _crazy_.”

They’re not bad; a little dark, because Ryan’s not used to cooking with cast iron and also not used to _cooking_ , but the flavor’s good and there’s real Vermont maple syrup in the cupboard.

Ryan must be feeling more like himself, because his easy chatter has returned in force. If anything he’s _more_ than usual, as if the euphoria of their perilous adventure has made him a hair manic. If he’s going to be like this all day, Shane will be ready for a nap by lunchtime.

It’s still snowing, big lovely fat flakes, but the wind has died down enough that they can see the damage eighteen hours straight of snow has done.

“Holy shit!” Ryan says. “I’ve never seen this much snow in my entire life.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this much snow in _my_ entire life,” Shane says. If it isn’t two full feet, it’s close. He imagines snow plows trying to clear that snow away from a one-lane uphill road like the one they’re situated on. He imagines inches of snow sitting heavy on power lines. He imagines going back in time and wringing Ryan’s neck for not checking the weather the day before they left.

“I meant, like, cumulatively. Add it all together.”

“I’m taking a shower,” Shane announces. “While there’s still hot water.” He’s ready for a proper shower, with shampoo and soap and enough room to maneuver.

“Shall I join you?” Ryan asks, and then he bursts into giggles. Shane had been wondering which defense mechanism it would be: pretend it didn’t happen or turn it into an inside joke. Ryan appears to have opted for the latter.  

“Sure, if I can look at your feet during.” Shane puts on an exaggerated leer, which only makes Ryan laugh harder. Ryan flicks water at him, and he ducks so it doesn’t hit him full in the face.

“Seriously though,” Shane says, heading for the shower. “Please tell me if any of your appendages turn black.”

“What’re you going to do about it if they do, perform an emergency toe amputation like in the Civil War times? Me biting down on a stick and then dying of, what’s-it-called, _sepsis_ in a week? We’re fucking stuck here.”

“Please, Mama, when will Papa be home from the war?” Shane says in a high-pitched Southern drawl. And then, in a lower tone: “Never, Anna Mae, he lost a toe in them thar hills and now his blood’s poisoned.”

“Oh Jesus!”

By the time he’s out of his shower and passed it off to Ryan, Ryan’s managed a complete inventory of everything in the cabin that could be considered entertaining. Like a lot of vacation rentals, the cabin appears to have acquired piecemeal some stray odds and ends that might qualify as fun to some people. 

Shane surveys the finds on the table. One (1) beat up Scrabble box. One (1) game of Candy Land. [One (1) 750-piece puzzle of four cats in a candy shop](http://buffalogames.com/cats-sweet-shop-kittens-750-piece-jigsaw-puzzle/). One (1) copy of _The Thorn Birds_ by Colleen McCullough, which Shane hasn’t read, but he knows it’s about a lady who bones a priest and feels guilty about it for seven hundred pages. Two (2) partial decks of cards, out of which a person might or might not be able to assemble one complete deck.

It’s a grim haul.

He shakes the cat puzzle out on the table and gets to work, and he keeps at it until he’s interrupted a few minutes later.

“Holy shit, dude. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Ryan leans over his shoulder, rubbing his wet hair with a towel.

“What?”

“You—you—you’re…” Ryan’s spluttering, gesticulating wildly, staring at the puzzle in disbelief.

“Use your words, Ryan.”

“Who hurt you? Were you raised in a _barn_?”

“Excuse you, Mark and Sherry Madej are saints. Seriously, what…?”

“Who does a puzzle and doesn’t start with the edge pieces?”

Shane shrugs, craning his neck around to watch Ryan’s mouth open and shut like a fish’s.

“I like a challenge.”

“You’re a freak show,” Ryan says, but he sits down across from Shane at the table and starts rooting for edge pieces with a sort of grim determination. Before Shane knows what’s happened it’s turned into a competition to see who can assemble more of the puzzle faster.

The infuriating thing is that Ryan soon overtakes him, because starting with the edge pieces _is_ easier. Shane doesn’t know why he has this inherent need to be stubborn, to make everything way more difficult for himself than it needs to be. If there was a prize for doing something the hard way to prove a point nobody else gives a shit about, Shane would be a contender. The Cut off Your Nose to Spite Your Face Award for Self-Sabotage.

[The puzzle](http://buffalogames.com/cats-sweet-shop-kittens-750-piece-jigsaw-puzzle/) starts to take shape, and it’s as hideous as the box promised. Three kittens with stupid sappy expressions on their little kitten faces cavort on shelves full of brightly-colored sweets, while the mom cat naps on the counter.

“Oh my god, it’s the boys,” Ryan says when the puzzle’s nearly done.

“Say what now?”                                                              

“Look, that’s you, all stretched out and tall for no reason. I’m the one that’s got the other end of the string and looks worried, right? Mark’s the one staring all stoic at the camera like he’s breaking the third wall. TJ’s the exhausted adult who’s sick of our shit.”

“You’re losing it,” Shane says, but he admits he can kind of see it. “We’re really Lady and the Tramping that string, huh?”

“Hurry up, we’ve gotta finish so I can take a picture of this. When we get back to civilization I’m going to ‘Gram it and tag you all.”

Outside, Shane can hear the little smack of ice pellets against the roof. He’s still not over how good it feels to be in here, rather than out _there_.

*

It’s all fun and games until the power goes out.

It’s about four o’clock and Shane’s been napping on the couch for a good hour when Ryan shakes him awake.

“What, man?” he slurs, sleep-stupid. “’s’wrong?”

“The power’s out,” Ryan says, and Shane forces his eyes open. Sure enough, all the overheads are out and the digital clock over the stove is dead. They’ve got an hour or so of natural daylight left, and then they’re going to be in the dark.

And it’s going to be _cold_.

“Okay, it’s go time! We’ve planned for this!” Shane says, hopping up. He’s energized to have something to do, something productive with a time constraint. “You get the candles, I’ll find the matches!”

“You’re like a nervous husband trying to hustle his pregnant wife to the hospital,” Ryan says, watching him root around in the utility closet and doing a terrible Shane impression. “You get the go bag, I’ll get the camera!”

“No, no, honey, you put your feet up,” Shane says, emerging triumphant with the box of matches. “Rest now, so you have the energy to bring sweet Ryan Shane Junior into the world later.”

“Why am I always the—never mind.”

They light some candles and get the flashlights and the spare batteries ready. There’s some firewood already cut that they can use for the fireplace, but Shane sort of thinks maybe they should save it if they can. Who knows how long they’ll be here without power, and it could get a whole lot colder.

“What about the food?” Ryan asks. He’s never more than half an hour away from thinking about food.

“Ryan, look outside. The world is our beer fridge.”

“Right. So now what?”

“Now, my friend, we get drunk.”

And they do. They get so drunk. They drink all the beer, and then they start in on a bottle of red wine they find in a dusty cupboard in the kitchen. The nearly-full bottle of peppermint schnapps they save.

Six beers and a glass of wine in, Shane’s feeling pretty damn good about his life. So what if he’s a little cold? He can put another pair of socks on. He’s alive, after all, and he’s got his dude here, and it’s Christmastime, and he did a cat puzzle today. A _cat puzzle_! When’s the last time he stopped long enough to do a cat puzzle?

He thinks Ryan’s not quite as drunk, because he might be smaller but he also drinks on a more regular basis than Shane does and his tolerance is better. He’s well on his way, though; Shane can tell by the brightness of his eyes and the pink flush of his cheeks.

Ryan really has extraordinary cheekbones, Shane can’t help but notice. Good jawline, great bone structure. His mouth’s all red, but that’s just from the wine, surely. _I’m looking at him too much_ , Shane thinks, and he takes another swig of wine. _Too Much Looking, is what this is._

The thing is that Ryan likes to be looked at, once he’s drunk enough that his inherent self-consciousness fades away. He keeps throwing his head back to laugh, all neck and white teeth, and Shane’s starting to feel attacked.  He thinks Ryan might be doing it on purpose, even if for no other reason than he’s bored and there’s no one else here to twinkle at and flirt with.

“It’s getting cold in here,” Ryan says, pouring them each another glass of wine. “Should we do something?”

“I think I’m too toasted to light a fire, I’d send the cabin up in flames. In retrospect, kind of a miscalculation.”

“No, I mean, just something to distract us from thinking about it.” Ryan thinks for a minute, cupping his hand around his neck and stroking absent-mindedly. Shane can’t believe he’s not doing that on purpose.

“Let’s play Truth or Dare,” Shane says, and he knows it’s a mistake the minute it leaves his mouth. Knows it’s a mistake as soon as he sees Ryan’s eyes light up. _Self-sabotage_.

They set the rules. You pick truth, you tell the truth or you take a shot of peppermint schnapps and have to answer a second question honestly no matter what. You pick dare, you do the dare or it’s a shot of peppermint schnapps and the other gets to pick something for the coward to tweet over the holidays.

“Age before beauty,” Ryan says with a little challenging jut of his chin. “Truth or Dare, Madej?”

Human beings can be divided into two categories: those who tend to choose truth while playing Truth or Dare, and those who tend to choose dare. Shane’s a truth guy, and he’s willing to bet that Ryan’s a dare guy. Frat guys always pick dare, as if to choose truth is an admission of weakness or of having feelings. Ryan’s not even like that, most of the time, but Shane’s sure the fratty instincts will take over. It’s like riding a bike.

“Truth.”

“Of course.” Ryan thinks for a minute, swirling the wine around in his glass like one of those douchey wine people who goes off about _mouthfeel_ and _tannins_. “Okay. Have you really never been scared at any of the locations we’ve been to for filming? Like, honestly, not even a little freaked out?”

Shane thinks for moment.

“I’ve been scared at _this_ one.”  Ryan will probably consider this a cop out, but it’s true, and that’s the name of the game.

Ryan frowns at him over his wine glass.

“I mean by something, you know, unexplained. Not because we got our own dumb asses lost in a blizzard.”

Shane considers telling him it’s too late, he’s already answered truthfully and Ryan’s turn is over. But instead he thinks back to all the places they’ve been, anything that’s been even remotely creepy. He’s in the mood to indulge Ryan tonight, to earn that five hundred watt smile every way he can.

“On the Queen Mary,” he says slowly. “There was a moment—do you remember?—where we heard a loud bang from where the old galley was. That was a little unsettling.”

“Hell yes I remember. God, and that fuckin’ pigeon?”

“And at Eastern State, when we were hearing those noises, I thought. I thought I saw something,” It had been a flurry of motion, a little blur at the edge of his vision that made him look more closely down the dark hallway. Probably nothing, or explained by a trick of the light—which is why he hadn’t said anything at the time—but he still remembers the bitter taste in his mouth from the surge of adrenaline.   

“Seriously? I assumed that was you trying not to shit yourself from baggage claim hot dogs all night.”

“Oh, it was also that. I still don’t think it was a ghost, but. There it is.”

Ryan looks at him askance, to the side and up, through twin rims of dark eyelashes. His face and neck are still flushed from the alcohol and his pinky is tracing the top of the wine glass. If Shane didn’t know better he’d say this admission is _doing_ something for Ryan, or maybe he’s just drunker than he seems. Then Shane clears his throat, and the moment’s over.

“Okay then. Pick your poison: truth or dare?”

Ryan pretends to think for a minute, but Shane’s sure what he’ll choose, and sure enough:

“Dare.”

Shane sucks the inside of his cheek, casting about the cabin for an idea. When you play Truth or Dare in a group, the dares inevitably trend to the naked end of things, but he’s not about to dare Ryan to take all his clothes off and run around the perimeter of the cabin in two feet of snow. The goal’s to forget the growing cold, after all, not freeze again.

“I dare you to, to—do a hundred push-ups. Right now, Mr. P90X.”

“Push-ups?” Ryan’s expression is bemused, but he’s already putting his glass down and rolling his neck. Shane had picked the number out of thin air because it seemed like an unfathomably high number of push-ups, but Ryan doesn’t seem concerned. It was probably a lowball.

“Yeah. Drop and give me a hundred, or whatever.”

“Yes, sir.”

And Shane’s not so sure he should like _that_ as much as he apparently does, but he doesn’t have time to think about it too hard because Ryan’s shucking his shirt off, tossing it on the couch, and stretching out his shoulders. The shirtless thing wasn’t part of the dare _at all_ and Shane’s alarmed at this sudden appearance, without warning or provocation, of back and pecs and golden-olive skin.

Ryan drops to the floor and starts pumping out push-ups like they’re nothing to him, and they probably aren’t. _Oh no_ , Shane thinks, watching Ryan’s back curve, forced in by the angle of his shoulders to make a long line all the way down to the base of his spine. _You played yourself_.

He’d thought the risk of Truth or Dare would come from Ryan himself, but the call was coming from inside the house the whole time.

Somewhere around push-up number thirty, Ryan starts to grunt. He’s always been a work-out grunter, like one of those world-class tennis players who makes a charging hippopotamus noise every time they hit the ball, and Shane’s used to finding it hilarious at best and off-putting at worst when they’ve filmed in the past. He is not accustomed to this twinge of arousal pooling in his belly, liquor-warm and impossible to ignore.

What a strange thing. Two days ago, Ryan’s body was just the essential shell for the things about him that Shane valued most: his easy sense of humor, his focus, his passionate defense of the things he cares about even if they happen to be _so_ dumb. Yesterday it was something to be looked after, to be cleaned up and kept intact. Today it’s something new, something else, and Shane can’t figure out how or when it happened.

“ _78_ —” grunt, “ _79_ —” grunt, “ _80_ …”

Shane must have a glazed-over look on his face. He tries to rearrange his expression into something more normal. It’s strange to be sitting here watching Ryan do push-ups—maybe he should be heckling? Shane of two days ago would be heckling rather than gawping, fish-mouthed, at Ryan’s naked torso.

“Looks like you’re slowing down a bit, there, buddy. Fifteen to go, think you can make it?”

“Shut— _85_ —up— _86_ —Shane— _87_.”

“Daysha was right, wasn’t she? Anything’s an excuse to take your shirt off,” Shane says. Ryan’s upper body’s covered in a fine sheen of sweat now, distractingly shiny in the dim flickering light of the candles. This whole thing’s starting to feel like an intrusive thought spiral, like when you notice a noise or a smell and then you can’t _un-notice_ it.  “You know there’s nobody to see it but me and the ghosts, right? I’m not filming right now. Your glorious physique will go un-remarked upon.”

Ryan grunts as he finishes the last ten reps. When he’s done he hops up and reaches for his shirt to wipe his brow with it, pushing damp hair out of his face. He looks at Shane and his eyebrows knit together, a flash of surprise that he smooths out again.

“There’s your hundred, big guy, and it kind of sounds like you just remarked on it. Feel free to pick your jaw up off the floor any time you’re ready.”

“My jaw’s firmly shut, thanks. All that’s on a floor is a little puddle of your sweat, stinking up the joint.”

Shane thinks he’s done an okay job covering on this one. As long as he doesn’t make any sudden movements for, oh, say, three to five minutes, and focuses on a couple of math problems, he’ll be fine. He shifts a little in his seat, trying to covertly rearrange things and hoping that his face isn’t as red as it feels.

“Truth or dare?” Ryan asks. He bites down on his bottom lip, hard enough that Shane runs his tongue over his own to soothe a small hurt he can’t feel.

“Truth,” Shane says by reflex, but when he sees Ryan’s quick glance down to the crotch of Shane’s sweatpants and back up he wishes he could change his answer to dare. _Oh no._

“Do you or do you not have a semi right now?”

Shane is filled with sudden loathing for drunk Ryan, who _has_ to find the weak underbelly and dig in even when the end result is to make everybody uncomfortable. There’s no graceful out for him here; either he can answer truthfully, or he can bow out and take the penalty—in which case Ryan will know the answer’s yes anyway.

He takes a nice long glug of wine to buy time. Ryan sits back on the couch, hands propped behind his head, a perfect picture of smugness.

“I,” Shane says, but there’s nothing for it. “Ugh, yes, but—”

“I fuckin’ knew it!” Ryan crows, and he tosses a triumphant fist up toward the ceiling. “Jaw firmly shut my ass.”

This is intolerable, is what it is. Shane’s glad Ryan’s not creeped out, that he’s chosen not to go all squirrely about a rogue half-mast boner that could happen to _anyone_ , but he could do without the gloating. It also wouldn’t hurt if Ryan would put his damn shirt back on.

“It’s been a long couple of days,” Shane says. “And the, you know, the snow, and being cooped up in here…”

He’s not sure where he’s going with this. It has the shape of a legitimate excuse, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

“It’s okay, man. I’m flattered. You don’t have to trip over your big feet explaining it. If you get me a little bit drunker I might not even remember.”

Sweet baby Jesus in the manger. Just what he wanted for Christmas: a new sexual hang-up to overcome. He’s going to close his eyes now and see Ryan, cabin-ing around and chopping wood and looking like the Brawny paper towel guy.

Lucky for him, drunk Ryan is also easy to distract. The game goes on, because to bow out now would be the same thing as admitting that Ryan’s bested him with his stupid beefy arms and his glistening brow, which is unacceptable. Ryan puts his shirt back on, thank God for small miracles. Shane dares Ryan to drink questionable milk from the fridge, which he chases with a retching sound and the last of the wine.

“What’s the stupidest thing you ever did while drunk?” Ryan asks Shane, after he picks truth yet again.

“I’m starting to think it’s this, right now. Playing truth or dare with you.”

“Stop going for truth and then giving me cop-out answers.”

“Who’s copping out? It’s either this or the time I ate the better part of a pumpkin raw, and you’ve already heard that story.”

“No questionable tattoos? No bad sexual decisions or drunk dials to exes?”

“I only make great sexual decisions,” Shane says, a statement which has historically been true but is starting to feel a little like a lie anyway, “drunk or otherwise.”

Ryan holds up his hands in mock deference.

It’s getting cold in the cabin now that it’s been dark for a couple of hours. It’s stopped snowing, but the wind’s picked up again and all the ambient heat has leeched out of the room through the cracks in the walls and roof. They break into the peppermint schnapps because they’re out of wine, and because they’re finally drunk enough that drinking peppermint schnapps straight from the bottle with no mixer sounds like a good idea.

Before long it’s too cold to do anything but lie flat on the ground under heaps of blankets, so their game of Truth or Dare transforms into more of a trading truths situation. There comes a point in any party, if you stay awake long enough, where the drinking takes an abrupt turn from raucous to introspective—or worse, maudlin—and Shane doesn’t think he’s ever seen that on Ryan. He’s curious what it will look like.

“Truth or truth?” he asks, and Ryan pretends, again, to think.

“Truth!” He pulls the blanket up all the way past his chin, big eyes and a mess of dark hair just peering over the edge at Shane.

There are a lot of things Shane could ask now, a lot of things he’d like to know about Ryan that he doesn’t often have motive or means or opportunity to find out. But he also doesn’t want to push too hard, ask for too much and send Ryan skittering away.

“Do you still believe in ghosts? Like, really. After all the looking we’ve done, and as little evidence as we’ve gotten?”

He says it as mildly as he can, because he isn’t trying to be combative. He genuinely wants to know. Ryan’s gotten braver and braver the more they’ve filmed, and it strikes Shane as a natural reaction to having your fear proved baseless. He’s asked variations on this question before, in the down-time during shoots, but Ryan’s always danced around it.

Ryan flops over onto his side, and he looks like a sandworm from Dune all rolled up in the blankets.

“You think I came running down to your bed last night because I thought _nothing_ was playing in the tub?” he asks.

“No, I just thought…never mind.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought you were freaked out by what happened yesterday, and maybe a little lonely. I was too, it’s weird to be stranded out here like this. I’m not _accusing_ you of anything.”

Ryan considers this. His hand pokes out from under the blanket to rub at his eyes, which are starting go drowsy and unfocused, and then to scrape over his jaw with its two-day stubble.

“I’m not sure what I think,” he says slowly. “I do believe ghosts exist. I’m not sure I think they’re as common as I once did. I think probably most of the places we go aren’t haunted.”

Shane’s surprised by the admission, but it makes a matched set with his own admission of fear earlier in the evening. They’ve both given a little, moved closer to each other today in some small way. He’s reminded of touching Ryan palm-to-palm in Bloody Mary’s house in New Orleans, miming themselves meeting in the middle. _Let’s never do that again_ , Ryan had said, right before he’d reached out to Shane a second time.  

“Thank you for saying that.”

Ryan moves under his blankets, what might be a shrug. Then he hits Shane with a real head-scratcher.

“Truth or truth: are you happy?”

Shane can’t remember the last time someone asked him if he was happy. He doesn’t know if Ryan means it in the sense of _are you happy here right now_ , or in the larger existential sense, or quite what the truthful answer to either of those would be. It’s a weighty question, and it deserves care.

“Can you be more specific? That’s a big question.”  

“Doing the show. Are you, like, content? You’re not getting bored with it?”

Shane hears the thinly-veiled undercurrent of anxiety and he understands what Ryan is asking: _you’re not getting bored with me?_ He thinks, sometimes, that it bothers Ryan that the success of the show is now wrapped up in the both of them, in their dynamic together. He can be a control freak, and it’s got to be stressful knowing that your ability to keep doing what you love is tangled up with someone else’s needs and whims.  

“No, man, I’m not bored with it. I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

“I’m afraid,” Ryan starts, “that you’ll…that one day it’ll be too dumb for you and you’ll quit so you can do something more meaningful, and then I’ll be left behind, talking about how I once had a popular show on YouTube.  Like somebody’s grandpa who sits on a park bench all day telling the squirrels his old war stories.”

His head sinks down further under the blanket, until all Shane can see is the top of his head.

“Ryan, man. Ry. That’s not.” Shane stops, because he can’t promise that it’ll _never_ happen. “Eventually, one day, we’re both going to want to do other stuff. But that’s a long way away. I get to hang out with my friends and travel to cool places and watch you humiliate yourself week after week to an audience of millions. That’s the dream.”

He waits for Ryan to re-emerge from the blankets, but he doesn’t.

“Ryan?”

“I’m just really cold,” comes the muffled confession. 

Shane laughs. He’s starting to sober up a little himself, and it’s making the cold less difficult to ignore. He’s spent the last five minutes rubbing his feet together under his own blanket, trying to generate that little bit of extra heat.

“Well let’s go to bed, then.”

*

By unspoken agreement they share again, because it’s too fucking cold to not use each other as a space heater. They go upstairs this time, where it’s a bit warmer. Shane’s grateful that TJ made them buy all those bottles of water now, because the pipes are already frozen under the kitchen sink and they need to hydrate or they’ll be miserable in the morning.

They get into the bed, and Shane realizes more or less immediately that he’s never going to get to sleep while Ryan’s teeth are chattering like that. It’s just this constant low-level noise, and every time he gets close to slipping off to sleep Ryan gives an involuntary full-body shake.

“Are you okay?”

“Don’t mind me, just freezing to death.”

“It occurs to me that we are wasting perfectly good body heat here,” Shane says, even though he knows in his heart of hearts that it is a capital-b Bad Idea. He doesn’t have anything left to hold himself back; all his inhibitions have been destroyed by the cold and the booze and by the memory, like a fever dream of a trashy romance novel, of Ryan’s back muscles rippling in soft candlelight. “I promise I won’t…” he trails off, not sure how to finish that thought.

Ryan does the human equivalent of a barrel roll, like he was waiting to be invited. He coils right up against Shane’s back, presses himself in from shoulders to ankles, and tosses his arm over Shane’s hip. He must be desperately cold, because Shane’s never known him to seek out contact like this. With dizzying immediacy Shane’s body starts to respond to the closeness, converting new, confusing thoughts into new, confusing physical reactions.

“You promise you won’t what?”

“Oh,” Shane says, exhaling. “I was just gonna say that I promise I won’t make it weird, but then I realized that saying that out loud would _make_ it weird. And now here I am, saying it and making it weird. So, um, basically ignore me and go to sleep.”

Shane can feel Ryan’s quiet laugh against his back, rocketing Ryan’s chest up against him. Ryan presses his forehead into the space between his shoulder blades.

“Did you want to?” Ryan asks. “Make it weird, I mean.”

It doesn’t seem like ribbing, but rather like an honest question, which—like “are you happy”—requires an honest answer instead of a squirmed-away evasion.

“I’m not sure I can trust myself right now. It might be the snow madness talking.”

“We already established that snow madness isn’t a real thing.”

“Well, in that case I’ll say that my body and my brain are giving me mixed signals and leave it at that. I’ll figure it out, you don’t have to worry about it.”

It must, Shane thinks, be about their near-miss yesterday. The stress of it must have re-wired his brain in some small but crucial way, invoked some kind of mysterious survival response in him that involves being inappropriately turned on by any level of intimacy or contact.

It’s just his brain tugging at his dick and screeching, _look how happy we are to be alive! Show some fucking respect!_

“You can, um, you can figure it out now if you want. Like, uh. Take care of it, if you’re…keyed up, or whatever.”

Shane lies there listening to Ryan stumble all over himself. It sounds an awful lot like Ryan is advocating that he take himself in hand and jerk off right there in the bed, which seems like a serious invasion of personal space.

“Pretty sure that’s an HR violation,” he says. What else can he say? His dick fucking adores the suggestion and the rest of him is mortified.

“I could, I could too,” Ryan babbles, “and then we’d be warm and we could, um, could go to sleep and it wouldn’t have to be a big deal.”

He realizes then that Ryan’s no longer flush against him; he’s got his hips canted away from Shane’s, his pelvis tilted backwards to put a few critical inches of space between their bodies. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Ryan might be feeling the same way, pent-up and dealing with strange physiological reactions.

 _No way, man_ , is what he means to say. But what he actually says is “Yeah?”

Ryan pulls away a little more, and then there’s a rustle of fabric that Shane’s pretty sure means Ryan has unceremoniously shoved his hand down his own sweats.

“Uh,” he says. What else is there to say? This is not normal behavior; this is the kind of behavior you think is a great idea only when you’re caught up in the vile tornado of puberty and barely have two brain cells to rub together.

Ryan’s breath catches in his throat, a little _hah, hmh_ , and that makes the decision for Shane. He might as well have two brain cells. He slides his own hand down the front of his sweats.

“Race you,” Ryan says, a competitive little asshole as fucking always, and the “you” turns into a gasping laugh at the end, like he can’t believe he’s said it. 

They don’t talk, but Ryan doesn’t move left his arm from where it’s slung around Shane’s waist either, which seems like an odd sort of compromise between forgetting the other is there and getting off on it. The weight of Ryan’s arm there, so close to where his own hand is moving, is a constant distraction. So are Ryan’s noises—he’s not loud but he’s not making the effort to be silent either, and every once in a while he lets out a little grunt under his breath that goes straight to Shane’s dick.

And then there’s the _slick, slick_ noise of Ryan stroking himself. Before he realizes he’s doing it, Shane’s timed his own strokes to Ryan’s rhythm, letting his hips jerk up into his hand in minute circles. He’s not used to jerking off on his side like this, he’d usually be on his back, but it feels important that he not shift too much or risk upsetting the delicate balance they’ve worked out.

He can tell Ryan’s close when the arm slung at his waist is suddenly just a hand, gripping his side right above his hipbone. Shane’s head whirrs and stalls from imagining what he can’t see, Ryan’s other hand working furiously down his sweats, sweaty forehead still pressed against Shane’s own upper back. If he focuses he thinks he can feel Ryan’s breath on the back of his neck, coming out in quick pants.

“Oh, _ah_ , fuck,” Ryan mutters, barely above a whisper, and then his fingers press down into Shane’s hip hard. Shane hopes there will be a stray bruise or two there in the morning, if only to prove that this really happened.

“I win,” Ryan says, and his voice is thick and sleepy with the prolactin rush. His hand loosens on Shane’s side, thumb smoothing and gentling over the skin there as if to soothe the pressure. “Come on, man. You can, it’s okay, it’s fine, please just—”

Shane doesn’t bother to bite back the whine as he comes, _please_ echoing in his ears.

*

He wakes up the next morning sticky and confused and warm. Ryan’s arm is still slung around him, or else has found its way there again in the night. He shifts a little and Ryan snuffles, tucked up at his back.

Shane’s started to have the silent debate with himself about whether he should stay here and face Ryan or if he should sneak away when he remembers that there’s nowhere to sneak to. They’re trapped here, forced by circumstance to face whatever awkwardness they’ve created head-on.

“Heat’s back on,” Ryan mumbles into Shane’s shoulder. “We made it, we didn’t freeze to death in the night.”

No wonder Shane’s so warm. Ryan’s body is a furnace, and between that and the return of the power and the pile of blankets they loaded on top of the bed last night he’s sweating so much the sheets are sticking to his side.

“You’re hot,” Shane says, unthinkingly. “Are you okay?”

“Thank you?”

“No, I mean you’re radiating heat. Do you have a fever?”

He turns around to peer into Ryan’s eyes, looking for glassiness, the awkwardness temporarily forgotten. He’s glad to have something else to focus on, something with a clear purpose. Ryan squints over at him, a look that says _I know what you’re doing_.

“I don’t have a fever. I feel—well, _so_ gross, I’m gonna hit the shower. But I don’t think I’m getting sick.”

Ryan gets up and heads for the stairs, tugging his shirt off as he goes, balling it up in his hands. In the doorway he pauses and looks back at the bed. He doesn’t seem freaked out; just a little flustered and a lot sleepy, and his mouth quirks up when he sees Shane watching him go.

“What do you think?” Shane asks. He’s not sure whether they need to talk or not, although he rather wouldn’t. He’s confused and half-awake himself, and it feels like he’s getting stupider by degrees the longer they’re stuck in this cabin. Less capable of making sound decisions with every passing minute.

“I think sometimes people get drunk and cold,” Ryan says with decisiveness. “Like, maybe we agree that it’s fine, and then it’s fine.”

Shane’s not sure that’s true, but also there’s a neat logic to it. It’s almost like the rest of the world doesn’t exist here at all.  Who gets what to decide what matters, if not them? Who will ever know?

It’s a suspiciously un-Ryan approach to life, is all. Ryan never met a problem or situation he couldn’t worry into the ground, tread over until it was smooth and looked the way he wanted. If Ryan’s not freaking out right now, that’s great, but Shane doesn’t want to be here when the other shoe drops.

“Fair enough.”

*

The inevitable fight, when it comes, is short but nasty. It comes out of nowhere, zero to sixty, and neither of them have the wherewithal to prevent the whiplash.

The morning starts well enough. The hot shower is nothing short of a miracle, and the eggs Shane scrambles with a little cheese taste better than just about anything he’s ever had. While he cooks, if it can be called cooking, Ryan roots around in the closet upstairs, looking for more stuff to do and probably upending most of the closet’s contents in the process.

“Sweet!”

“Did you say ‘sweet’? What is this, ‘Dude, Where’s My Car’?”

Ryan comes galumphing down the stairs with a weird pile of wood in his arms, and Shane brandishes the spatula to keep him away from the stovetop. Ryan dumps his armful on the table.

“Snowshoes!” He’s flush with accomplishment, like he thinks they’re going to snowshoe their way back to civilization or something.

“Stowe’s 30 miles away, Ryan. It would take us nine hours to walk there in good conditions, let alone in two feet of snow on snowshoes we’ve never used before over road we can’t see. At least here people know where we are.”

Ryan’s face falls.

“I didn’t think that—I thought they were cool. I wasn’t trying to…you don’t have to be mean about it, Jesus.”

Just like that, Shane’s annoyed with Ryan, with the crestfallen look on Ryan’s face, with himself. With this whole thing. He doesn’t know what they think they’re doing here, playing house together in a painfully unhaunted cabin and pretending their real lives won’t suffer for it. He knows that Ryan’s always like this, tightly-wound and capricious, but today it grates where it would usually charm.

“Just, you know, grow up. God forbid you contribute something instead of making a mess of every surface and closet and person in this cabin because you can’t stand still for five minutes.”

Shane can tell he’s being unreasonable, can tell he’s picking a stupid fight because he’s stir-crazy and, yeah, because last night is still eating at him more than he’d care to admit in this brave new who-cares-it’s-fine world. That doesn’t mean he’s capable of stopping himself from doing it. It doesn’t even mean he wants to.

Ryan bites his lip, caught in the crossfire of his bewilderment. Then it curls in that way that Shane knows means he’s going to take the bait. Maybe he wants it too, a way to take out his frustration that’s easier to patch over than the path they inched down together last night.

“Hey man,” he says, “don’t snipe at me because you’re going through some shit. That’s not my fault.”

“Oh, _I’m_ going through some shit?”

“You have spent this—this entire trip looking at me, and touching me, and. And it’s fine, it is, but it’s still a lot all of a sudden. You don’t get to yell at me about it because I’m still trying to catch up.”

“Last night was you, Ryan. That was on you, so news flash, you’re all caught up and then some. I would have rolled over and gone to sleep and never said a goddamn word.”  

“I was drunk!” Ryan yells. “And I was freezing, and you were _looking_ at me, and you were _there_.”

 _You were convenient_ , he might mean, or maybe _I was bored and I wanted to see what would happen_ , or perhaps _I was horny and you were window dressing_. This strikes Shane as the worst kind of historical revisionism and he doesn’t bother to ask for clarification. Ryan’s not above a little cruelty when he’s pissed, and suddenly it’s colder in the cabin than it could ever be outside.

“Thanks, Ryan,” Shane says, bone-brittle and sharp to hide the hurt. “And just like that, I’m cured. I’ll make sure not to _look_ at you anymore. My present to you.  Merry fucking Christmas.”

Shane drops a plate of scrambled eggs in front of Ryan, who then has to make the difficult decision of eating because he’s starving or refusing it because he’s pissed. He settles for shoveling eggs into his mouth as fast as he can while looking resentful about it.

“And for the record,” Shane adds, “you weren’t that drunk, and I’m not that stupid.”

He stalks into the master bedroom and slams the door, leaving Ryan to wash the dishes or not, sulk or not, cry about it or not.

*

Shane’s not sure how long he’s in the bedroom alone. He reads for a while ( _The Thorn Birds_ , it turns out, is shit) and then he falls into a nice rage-nap like a cranky little kid. 

Something wakes him up a while later, a noise from somewhere in the cabin. It must be well into the afternoon because the weak winter sun is pouring through the west-facing bedroom window.

Shane’s starting to get hungry again, and he’s also starting to find the guilty clench of his stomach untenable already. They’ve both said some things they’ll want to take back—he already wants to take them back, wanted to take them back as soon as he’d said them—and Ryan had, after all, been right: he’d picked that fight for reasons that had very little to do with Ryan at all.

He takes a leak and then wanders out into the living room, ready to find the words for an apology, but Ryan’s not there. He’s also not in the kitchen.

“Ryan?”

Shane takes the steps two at a time, but Ryan’s not in the loft bedroom either.

“Ryan! I know you’re mad, and I’m sorry I was a dick, but—”

He comes back downstairs, and that’s when he notices that one of the two pairs of snowshoes is missing. That Ryan’s coat and gloves and boots are missing. That Ryan isn’t there at all, and maybe hasn’t been there for hours, may have been outside for God knows how long while Shane slept in the next room. 

“Fuck!” Shane swears as loudly as he can manage, and then he kicks the leg of the shabby couch for good measure.  “Fucking— _fuck!_ ”

In the end there’s only one decision Shane can live with and it has to be made now, now, _right now, goddamn it, Ryan_. He fumbles with the snowshoes, taking a good five minutes he can’t afford to lose to figure out how to strap them to his own boots. Then he layers on his own scarf and gloves and throws himself out into the snow, seeing blurry through fogged-up glasses and his own panic.

*

It’s hard to walk in the snowshoes, and the snow’s been packed down by wind and ice enough that there are no prints. Shane can’t even be sure of the direction Ryan’s taken. All that marks the long driveway back to the road is an absence of trees stretching out in front of the cabin, and Shane makes his way down that. He prays Ryan doesn’t have too much of a head start, that his own long legs will let him make up the time.

He’s not even half a football field away from the cabin when he hears the shout behind him.

“Where the actual fuck do you think you’re going?”

Shane turns around and—it’s Ryan, standing in front of the cabin he just left, clad in the snowshoes and all his winter gear. Shane’s knees almost give out from under him with an intense visceral relief, and he has to kneel with a hand on the snow and _breathe_. There are tears in the corners of his eyes that he only notices when they freeze there and he has to chip away at them with his gloved fingers.

After he’s pulled himself together he trudges back to Ryan, and when he’s standing in front of him he pulls Ryan into a fierce, unthinking hug. Ryan’s arms fly out, confused, and then he gives Shane a pat on the back.

“I thought you left,” Shane croaks when he pulls back.

Ryan looks up at him from under his beanie.

“Why would I leave?” he asks. “Where would I _go_? You said it yourself, we’re thirty miles from civilization and there are no roads.”

“I—we fought. I thought you were upset.”

Ryan crosses his arms over his chest. He does not look impressed by Shane’s unnecessary rescue effort.  

“No shit I was upset. I’m still upset. But I’m not an idiot, and I’m not a child who’s going to run off the minute my babysitter takes his eyes of me. You do know that, right? You’re not my babysitter and you’re not my boss and you’re not my dad.”

This isn’t going great. Shane can feel it spinning off into a rogue direction already, past his grasping fingertips and out of his control. Nothing good ever, _ever_ came of “you’re not my dad.” All he has left is the bare truth.

“I don’t think you’re stupid or a child. I just, I woke up and you weren’t there and I panicked. I couldn’t think. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“So your plan was to go snowshoeing out into the Vermont wilderness after me like an insane person with no regard for your own safety?”

“Yes?”

Ryan rubs his jaw with a gloved hand, trying to decide if Shane’s story checks out, where it falls on the scale of plausibility (ten being something logical and scientific, and one being Underwater Area 51). Shane can tell it’s passed the sniff-test when his eyes soften into fondness.

“Okay, well. Okay. Instead of being a fucking lunatic, do you want to help me build this snowman?”

Shane has to admit he did not see that one coming. Ryan purses his lips, maybe realizing with regret that it isn’t the most adult sentence he’s ever uttered, that it undercuts his big declaration a little.

“What?”

“That’s why I was out here. I was trying to build a snowman. That’s all I wanted to do with the snowshoes the whole time, not that you asked.”

Shane doesn’t flummox easily, but he’s flummoxed. Every time he thinks Ryan’s going to zig he zags. It’s dizzying.

“What do you mean, _trying_?”

“SoCal, remember? I’ve never made one before, not with more than like an inch of snow. There’s a learning curve.”

Instead of fighting, instead of sulking, instead of tramping off into the woods, they build a damn snowman. It’s an apology snowman. Along with the snow they roll up their resentments, and their overreactions, and at least seventy percent of their fears, and one cold hour later they’ve got substantially lighter hearts and something that looks more or less like a snowman.

“Come here,” Ryan says, and he grabs for Shane’s scarf and tugs.  Shane comes with it, pulled in close for just a moment, and then Ryan’s unwinding it from his neck and putting it around the neck of the snowman.

“He needs a name.”

Ryan looks the snowman over. “Father Thomas.”

Then he leans down, shapes one more little ball, heaves it right at Shane’s face at point-blank range, and darts away—or as close to darting as anyone who started walking on snowshoes in the last two hours can hope to manage.

“You little shit!”

It’s _on_.

They’re well-matched. Ryan’s got Shane beat on athleticism; he’s stronger, and faster, and having less limb and less foot to contend with turns out to be a real advantage on the snowshoes. But Shane’s got the strategy, gleaned from decades of experience with snowball fights and the physical properties of snow in general.  

In the end it’s Ryan who triumphs, thanks to a tactical error Shane couldn’t have foreseen. The loss of his scarf in the completion of the snowman creates a chink in his winter armor: a bare stretch of vulnerable skin at his neck and throat.

After twenty minutes of sweaty, relentless long-range combat, Ryan rugby tackles Shane, aiming his full weight at Shane’s midsection to take him down into the snow. Shane’s pinned before he even realizes it’s happening, sunk down into the snow, and then Ryan is sitting astride his hips, the better to shovel snow down his jacket through the hole where the scarf would have protected him.

“Augh!” Shane howls around a mouthful of snow, freezing pellets burning on his neck and chest. “Uncle, uncle! Jesus Christ, you win!”

Ryan sits up, throws his head back, and _laughs_.

“You’re a madman, Bergara,” Shane says admiringly, and then Ryan’s smile is glinting down at him, and then Ryan’s face is very close to Shane’s, so close he can see individual eyelashes and the tiny ice crystals clinging to them. And then Ryan is _kissing him_.

It’s a whirlwind of conflicting sensory information, all hitting Shane at once.

Ryan’s gloved hands are cold and wet where they’re brushing the snow off Shane’s neck and curling into the lapels of his coat, but his chapped lips are warm. They’re both breathing heavy and ragged from the exertion and the laughing. There’s also the part where Ryan’s hips are driving Shane deeper into the snow until he thinks he might be drowning in it, the heat generated from their bodies turning it to meltwater around them.

He feels a little like he’s melting too.

Ryan pulls back after a moment. He brushes a little more snow off Shane’s collarbone, and then he’s rolling off and hauling himself to his feet, reaching a hand down to help pull Shane out of the snow.

“A great victory has been won this day,” he says with solemn reverence, “and to the victor, the spoils.”  

Honest to God, Shane has no idea what the fuck is happening.

*

Back inside, they change into dry clothes and Ryan’s back under blankets before Shane can so much as blink. Ryan insists that Shane make them hot tea and get a fire going in the fireplace, refusing to do any labor on account of his domination on the field of battle.

Shane suspects that Ryan is testing him, making obnoxious demands to see if Shane will humor him and how much he can get away with. Shane’s worried the answer is that he’ll let Ryan get away with a lot. Evidence is starting to pile up to suggest he’s not capable of being entirely rational where Ryan is concerned.

He joins Ryan under the blanket, and Ryan tosses his socked feet—those dumb ankle socks jocks always seem to be wearing even when they aren’t actively working out—into Shane’s lap. The hand not holding Shane’s cup of tea falls there as if by instinct to trap them, thumb bracing in the arch of a foot and pressing in. He’s aware—they’re both aware—that this is outside the normal range of behavior for friends, for the kind of friends they are. Then again, so is making out in the snow.

“So I had a thought,” Ryan says.

“I hope you caught it on camera, or nobody will believe you.”  

“Fuck off, let me—okay. Out there, my life flashing before my eyes, I had an _idea_ and I want you to tell me if I’m off-base.”

“Shoot.”

“What if this cabin is, is Vegas?”

“I don’t follow.”

“You know. What happens in the cabin stays in the cabin.”

“Tell me again,” Shane says, “who is going through some shit? Because I could swear you said it was me, and yet—”

“Shut up.”

“—and _yet_ I get this uncanny sense that you’re projecting like an IMAX.” He finds the pressure point of an ankle and pushes against it, letting his thumbnail sink in above the line of sock.

“I’m sure it’s the snow, and the near-death experience, and the proximity.” Ryan says. “Like, I’m sure there are reasons for it. What I’m saying is, what if we try it and see? And then we can go back to our real lives and it’ll just be this nice cabin thing we can drop hints about to our grandchildren when we get dementia.”

“Hashtag just cabin things!”

“I’m serious.”

“All I know is that I want to kiss you again,” Shane says, and it gives him a little burst of pleasure and fear to say the words out loud even as he acknowledges them to himself for the first time.  “And I will probably agree to whatever your conditions are to make that happen.”

“Not—conditions.” Ryan sighs and pulls his feet off Shane’s lap so he can sit up and look at him properly. “It’d be complicated, right? Out there. Working together, and, and everything. Maybe here it can be easy.” 

“I can be easy,” Shane says, enjoying the way Ryan’s face splits into a sunshine grin. “I can be _so_ easy. Easy like Sunday morning, baby.”

Ryan reaches over and takes the mug of tea from Shane’s hand. He carefully sets it on the floor, next to his own, and then he wipes his hands on his sweats. Shane’s living in that moment in a horror movie when the shrill violins start to build and the blonde chick goes into the basement alone: something’s about to happen, he knows it is, but he doesn’t know what.  Not for sure.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Ryan warns. “Like, always, but also now specifically.”

“Well, what would you usually do? What are your _moves_ , Bergara?”

“You want the full works?”

God help him, Shane does. He doesn’t know why he does, and he doesn’t know what the works even are, but he wants to find out so badly that his tongue is dry and far too big for his mouth.

And just like that Ryan’s more at ease, putting on a show and pulling off a joke all at the same time. He slides over to sit close to Shane, tucking himself in at Shane’s side, and then he _yawns_ —a big, exaggerated stretch of arms over head—and slides his arm around Shane’s shoulder.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me. That cannot be your move.”

Ryan ducks his chin into his shoulder, hiding a smile, and his hand finds the far side of Shane’s neck. Shane jumps a little when his thumb rubs a little circle into the thin skin behind his ear.

“Lookin’ for a coin back there, buddy?”

“I was going to be civilized about this, but you’ve left me no choice but to shut you the damn hell up.” Ryan flicks Shane’s earlobe and pushes himself up into a kneel, putting himself more or less even with Shane. He leans in, and Shane can hear him breathing—can feel his nerves in the uneven catch of the inhale.

“All talk,” Shane starts to say, “and no act—”

True to his promise, Ryan doesn’t let him finish. He leans the rest of the way in to fix his mouth to Shane’s, warm and just the right amount of slip, and Shane could—he could get used to this. Or, absent the opportunity to be allowed to get used to it, he’s going to _remember_ it.

Ryan tastes like the tea they’ve been drinking, something a little minty and woodsy with a kick of cinnamon. Crisp and Christmas-y, to match the smell of the snow-thick air outside. Shane runs his hands along broad shoulders, the soft pill of his t-shirt. He’s a good kisser, now that Shane has the time to think about it and a good deal more feeling in his face; it’s less manic this time, measured and intensifying by slow, steady degrees.

Shane can be into that, he can, but maybe not right this minute. Every second they’ve spent trapped in this cabin together has wound him tighter. He’s not built, as Ryan is, to cycle between extreme feelings this fast, fear to joy to anger and back to fear again. He can’t live with the tension any more, and he has to break it the best way he knows how: with his hands, and Ryan under him making those noises he got a preview of last night.

He doesn’t break their contact, he just eases himself up and presses Ryan down in as smooth a motion as he’s capable of. He half-expects Ryan to push back, but Ryan _goes_ , back on the couch cushions and tipping his head to the side to let Shane suck a hickey onto his neck that no one but them will ever see.

“This is quite the seduction,” Ryan says, hissing when Shane nips a little too hard and then soothes it over with his tongue. “Feels like you should be laying me out on a bearskin rug or something.”

“I’ll lay you out anywhere you want,” Shane mumbles into his neck, and enjoys how Ryan wriggles under him and laughs when the words ghost over ticklish spots. The laugh morphs into a low groan when Shane lets his hand work up under Ryan’s shirt to rest, palm-flat and fingers spread wide, on his stomach.

“Why is that—why is this _working_?”

Shane’s not quite over the surprise yet himself, but it is undoubtedly working. He’s hard in his pajama pants, bare and straining against the red and green checkered flannel. Ryan’s hips are twitching and rolling up in little circles to meet him, and he can tell that Ryan’s hard too. It’s strange to rock down and be met with no softness, no give.

“Can you get off like this, if I keep…?”

“Maybe?” Ryan bites his lip and grinds up, like he’s checking. Shane adjusts to slot their legs together better, reaches around to grab Ryan by the hips and hold him still for a drag of thin material against thin material, and Ryan lets out a disbelieving huff of laughter. “Yeah, yes I…oh yeah, but.”

“But?”

“But we’re running out of clean clothes.”

Shane stills his hips then, although the effort of doing so nearly kills him. Every cell in his body is urging him on, on, more _, now_ and not in a minute and not in ten, but he recognizes logic when he hears it. He lies there panting for a moment, frozen with choice paralysis and feeling Ryan’s little frustrated movements beneath him.

Luckily for them both, Ryan’s much smarter than he seems when he’s telling the camera that cloning’s never been done before or that nobody knows how black holes work. He grabs for Shane’s pajama pants and tugs them down to mid-thigh in one fluid motion. Then he’s wriggling half-out of his own sweats, pulling them down far enough to keep them out of the splash zone.

“Is this the full works?” Shane asks as Ryan arches into him, letting the bare hot skin of his cock rub against hipbone and belly and finally, _finally_ , against Shane’s own.

“Nah. New move just for you, big guy.” And oh wow, Shane likes that a lot. A lot a lot. So much it has him gasping at the familiar heat coiling in his belly.

The pressure, the slide, is _almost_ enough—Shane hasn’t gotten off like this in a long time. For a long minute he hovers right on the edge, ready to come but not quite able to, shoulders shaking with the strain. As if he can sense Shane’s frustration, or he’s feeling it himself, Ryan licks his hand and reaches down between their bodies to wrap it around Shane with an experimental grip. The touch is lighter than Shane would use on himself, but it doesn’t matter: in ten tentative strokes, maybe less, he’s seeing snow behind his eyelids and coming.

Ryan wriggles under him and reaches for himself with a come-covered hand, something that will haunt Shane’s dreams and probably also his waking hours forever. Shane lets himself tip to the side a little, squished between Ryan and the back of the couch, and bats his hand away.

“It’s okay, I’ll—” Ryan starts to say, as Shane says, “Not a chance” and returns the favor.

Ryan’s head falls back against the arm of the couch with an audible _thunk_ as his hips push up into Shane’s hand. There isn’t time for Shane to worry about technique; he reaches up to fist a hand in Ryan’s already-mussed hair and yank his head back, presses his mouth to Ryan’s neck, and pulls his orgasm from him by force rather than finesse.

They lay there for a minute getting their breath back, and then Shane starts to laugh.

“I’m glad ghosts aren’t real, because if they were I think they’d be upset right now.”

“Oh fuck, I forgot _again_.”

“Ryan, you planned this trip for the ghosts!  We came here to ghost-bust, not to eat sandwiches and canoodle in front of a blazing fire.”

It’s starting to get sticky and cold between their bodies, so Shane waits what he figures is an appropriate amount of time and sits up.

“Are you good?” It wouldn’t be out of the realm of normal Ryan Bergara behavior for Ryan to pick this thing apart in his head and analyze it from every angle until it blows up in his face, a chance Shane took when he made the decision to do it.

“Mmmhm. I thought—I expected it to be weirder, honestly.”

“I guess old dogs can learn new tricks.” Shane points at himself, “Old dog,” and at Ryan, “new trick.”

Ryan sits up with an indignant squeak. “What did you call me?” And then, hot on its heels: “Oh, I _could_ go for a sandwich. Maybe some soup too.”

*

They clean up again (this guy’s water bill is going to be through the roof) and set about trying to pop popcorn over the fire. It strikes Shane as 50-50 odds that they’ll manage it or that they’ll burn the place down and have to live in a hand-dug igloo outside until they’re rescued. As he watches Ryan pour kernels into the heavy old open-fire popper and stick it over the flame, he can’t work up the energy to worry about it.

The first kernel pops, and Ryan jumps and laughs at himself for being startled. “Oh shit!”

It ends up working pretty well, and Shane props himself up on the couch with his bowl of popcorn and a book; he’s abandoned _The Thorn Birds_ , which would have been ruined by their stupid fight even if it wasn’t already terrible, for an old Agatha Christie mystery that he’s read at least twice before.

Ryan’s lying on his back on the floor, trying to toss popcorn up in the air and catch it in his mouth. He’s got a little game going now; for every ten he catches in a row he takes a sip of tea, and for every three in a row he misses he pinches himself on the arm. It doesn’t take long for this ritual to pull Shane’s attention from _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_.

“You’re gonna bruise up your whole arm like that, your aim sucks.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want _bruises_ ,” Ryan says, and he throws the next piece of popcorn at Shane. Shane can see the marks on Ryan’s neck from here, stark and purple right where he sucked them in.

When Ryan runs out of popcorn he starts stretching on the floor, which is even more distracting. He spreads his legs in front of him in a V-shape and bends down, reaching for each of his ankles in turn. Shane watches muscles move and shift under the thin fabric of the t-shirt, which rides up to reveal a patch of lower back.

When he can’t stand it anymore, he says, “Ryan.”

Ryan looks over and Shane pulls back the blanket he’s under to show that Ryan’s welcome to join him. Ryan considers the offer for a minute and then he’s scooting up off the floor to curl up against Shane under the blanket. He slots in perfectly, head under Shane’s chin.

“Were you serious about the cabin-is-Vegas thing? You think we’re going to be able to go back to the way things were, like this never happened?”  

It bothers Shane that he can only see the top of Ryan’s head, or about a quarter of a profile if he pulls back. Ryan’s a terrible liar, if you can get your eyes on his, but like this he can’t be sure.

“Dead serious. I’m not saying there’s anything _wrong_ with this, it’s. It’s good, it’s crazy but it’s good. I just think it would be hard out there.”

It would be hard. They would have to talk about what they are, what they’re doing. There would be HR, and awkwardness, and explanations—to friends, and family, and eventually fans—and all the nightmares pursuant to that. There would be the show, hanging over their heads always; the possibility that every fight might be the one they don’t come back from. And there’s the old standard, the fear that comes when any two friends take a step into something more and know there’s a chance they’ll ruin a good thing in the process.

But even so.

“Sometimes things that are worth having are hard,” Shane says carefully.

“I can’t—I can’t risk the show. It’s too important to me.”

Ryan’s hiding behind the show because it’s solid ground for him, but Shane doesn’t push. It’s ridiculous to be pre-emptively mourning the loss of a thing you didn’t have a day ago and didn’t even _want_ three days ago. He won’t die on a hill that didn’t exist last week.

“And…” Ryan takes a minute to decide if he wants to continue, and then he forges ahead. “Until we got here I don’t think this ever crossed my mind as an option. I know snow madness isn’t a thing, but I still do think there’s a not-insignificant chance that this is a weird one-off.”

“You think we’ll get back to our lives and we won’t even want it?” Shane says we, but he means you. He already knows that won’t happen to him.

“I mean, I think it’s _possible_. So I don’t want to make any promises that we, that I, can’t keep.”

Ryan sounds like he’s working out a theory in real time, talking through a question from a fan on the Postmortem or something. Shane can’t see his eyes, but he’s sure Ryan’s staring off into space with that quizzical expression plastered on his face. He’s glad that Ryan can’t see _his_ face either.

“Okay,” he agrees, and Ryan relaxes a little against him, tension leaking out of his shoulders. “That’s your call. I promised I’d be easy, and I meant it.”

He picks up his book again, meaning to drop it and read, and Ryan pokes him in the leg.

“Read it out loud. Start from the beginning.”  Again with the demands, but it doesn’t seem too high a price to pay to keep Ryan tucked up against his side like this, cozy and content and _still_ for once in his damn life.

“I thought you didn’t want to read any of my nerd books?”

“That’s not a nerd book, that’s a mystery. I can roll with a mystery. Make sure you do all the voices, too.”

“Oh,” Shane says, “I see what this is. You miss the Hot Daga.”

“As if I’d give you the satisfaction. You just do good voices.”

Shane sighs, pretending that it’s an imposition, but he doesn’t mind at all. He starts to read, and Ryan settles in. Shane’s barely halfway through the first chapter when Ryan’s breathing slows and evens out and his head lolls on Shane’s shoulder. Shane will wake him in a while and drag him off to sleep in a real bed, but for now he’s content to sit with his book and the fire and feel Ryan breathe against him.

 _This is nice,_ he thinks, _but I don’t need it. I lived without it for thirty-two years, and I’ll live without it again._

                                                                                             *

They wake up the next day curled up like cats in the master bedroom, where Shane had shepherded a mostly-asleep Ryan the night before. 

Ryan must have woken up first, because when Shane opens his eyes he sees Ryan looking back at him, almost nose-to-nose.

“Morning.”

“Were you watching me sleep? That’s creepy.”

“Only for a couple minutes. Wanted to see how much drool could accumulate on your pillow before you started to drown.”

“What time is it?” Shane asks, turning on his back to stretch his arms straight out, wincing as joints crack. He hasn’t been this well-rested in a long time.

“Late, I think, but my phone’s dead so I don’t know. So’s yours, we should charge those.”

The idea of re-engaging with the real world makes Shane’s heart drop into his stomach, an unpleasant little jab like an elbow in the solar plexus. He knows the roads are still impassable and will be for a good day or two yet unless there’s a miracle melt, but he’s worried that hearing TJ’s voice or getting an email from Devon will jolt them back into reality before he’s ready to be there.

“Later.” He waves his hand, dismissing it as a problem for future Shane and Ryan to worry about. “I’ve seen my shadow. Six more weeks of winter.”

“They’re gonna have to haul your Punxsutawney Phil ass out of this cabin kicking and screaming.”

“You know me,” Shane says, “I love a good cabin. I’m a cabinhead.”

“I’ll show you cabin head,” Ryan rebuts without thinking, and then he turns his face into the pillow to stifle a nervous snicker. “Oh shit, wait, that’s—”

All the air leaves Shane’s lungs at once, a _woosh_ that’s part laugh, part shock, and part interest. 

“Maybe,” he says, lightheaded from the speed with which most of the blood in his head has rushed down to his dick. “For now, c’m’ere.”

He gets his hands at Ryan’s waist and hauls Ryan in for a kiss, morning breath be damned. Ryan “hmmm”s into his mouth and clambers on top of him, surprisingly heavy. He lets Shane strip his t-shirt off and toss it with blind indifference into a corner, to be joined by Shane’s own not long after.

Unlike last night, they take their time. Shane doesn’t want to be rushed; after all, he doesn’t know how many more chances he’ll get. He wants to touch everywhere he can touch—behind Ryan’s knee, and the sensitive, ticklish skin on his ribs just under his armpit, and the back of his neck where the hair is softest—while he’s allowed to do it.

Shane ignores himself for now, flips Ryan on his back, tugs his sweats down and off. Ryan’s commando under them still, cock hard and flushed to the tip. Shane thought he might tease a little, make Ryan wait for it, maybe even _beg_ for it, but now that push has come to shove he doesn’t have the willpower.

Shane runs a fingertip up the vein on the underside, base to ridge, enjoying the way Ryan is holding his hips in check, working his abs trying to keep himself from jerking up. He slips his finger around the crown, up to the tip to tap at the slit, back down to rub under the head. It makes Ryan swear, and Shane feels validated. He doesn’t know dicks in general that well, but he knows his own, and it would seem that they’re more or less on the same page.

Shane spits into his hand as covertly as he can and sits back on his heels between Ryan’s spread legs. Then he wraps his hand around Ryan’s cock and jerks him off slow and steady.

“Hah,” Ryan says, not really a word at all and not a laugh either, more like a punched-out syllable of air.

This is good, this is great—Shane could quite happily do this, just this, all day. Suns could rise and set and he’d be happy to give Ryan handjob after handjob until he gets carpal tunnel or until Ryan’s dick falls off, whichever comes first. But there’s also a little voice in the back of his head, all the time. _Seize the day, you don’t have many more of them_.

He leans down to mouth at Ryan’s chest, bite at each of his nipples in turn, and then work his way down in a purposeful trail from sternum to naval. Ryan’s got just the sparsest hair under his belly button leading down, and Shane lets his mouth follow it until he can’t go any lower without bumping Ryan’s dick with his chin. Then he looks up Ryan’s body, and Ryan’s looking down at him with big eyes.

Shane knows Ryan’s had enough sex to know what his body language is asking, but then he thinks maybe he should actually ask too, all things considered.

“Is it cool if I…?”

“Super chill, bro,” Ryan says, laughing into the flexed wrist pressed against his lips. “Oh my god.”

“Well now I don’t even want to.” Shane diverts course to bite at Ryan’s left hip, then the juncture of hip and thigh, and then the tender fleshy part of inner thigh.

“Please want to,” Ryan breathes out, which satisfies Shane’s earlier need to get him begging nicely.

Shane puts his mouth on Ryan, a tentative lick mirroring his strokes from base to tip, and then he fits Ryan’s cock in his mouth, tries to move his tongue and move down at the same time. Ryan’s hand hovers at his shoulder for a minute and then lands in his hair to rest gently there. He doesn’t expect Ryan to get rough with him, but the pressure of his hand there buoys Shane on.

He tries to get the pressure right, the suction, the rhythm. It’s a lot going on, but he thinks it’s going okay by the noises Ryan’s making, more vocal than he was for hand stuff. He keeps alternating between looking down at Shane and then looking away, like he can’t watch for too long or he’ll lose it. Shane wants to make him lose it.

The next time Ryan looks down at him, Shane sinks down as far as he can go and looks up. He’s known women to try this particular move, knows the jolt of arousal he’s felt at seeing someone meeting his eyes around a mouthful of his cock. Sure enough, Ryan’s eyes roll back in his head a little and his hips snap up, totally out of his control, and Shane has to pull back coughing.

“Sorry! I’m sorry. I can’t, if you do that, I’ll—”

Shane licks around the head, presses the tip of his tongue into the slit and tastes salt.

“Yeah, I know you will. The fuck you think I’m doing this for?”

Ryan pets Shane’s hair a little, smooths down a stray cowlick, and then pulls his arms up over his head, biceps bracketing his ears.

That’s probably why he doesn’t hear the sounds of sputtering motors outside.

Shane reapplies himself, goes all-in, takes as much of Ryan as he can at as fast a pace as he can keep up. All he can hear are Ryan’s noises, moans and the stray whimper and a bitten off _oh fuck,_ and his own blood roaring in his ears.

That’s probably why he doesn’t hear the front door open and then shut.

Then, two important things happen almost at once, in the span of ten horrible, glorious seconds. It’s something of a watershed moment in Shane’s life, an unlikely confluence of wet dream and nightmare that shapes everything that comes after.

First: Ryan reaches down to grip his head again, lets out a guttural moan, and Shane can feel him tightening under his tongue and under his hands.

“Heads up, ‘m gonna—” and then he does, he comes, and Shane is swallowing and his eyes are tearing up a little from the stretch of his jaw and Ryan is _shaking_ , his whole body is shaking. Shane’s overwhelmed by the sensations, by Ryan heavy and twitching in his mouth and thick in his throat.

Second: The bedroom door opens, and TJ springs in, Mark on his heels.

“Are you guys in here? I heard—Jesus _fucking_ Christ.”

A shocked beat of silence. A sharp intake of breath from Mark, a muttered “nope,” and then TJ is backing them out of the room and slamming the door behind them.

Shane pulls off Ryan’s softening cock and looks up to find him staring down again, this time in pure frozen horror. Shane still has come on his tongue. Seconds ago he had been more turned on than he’d ever been in his whole life, and now he’s numb all over. Barely a physical being at all, just a detached spirit longing to sink through the floor.

Ryan’s hands fly to his face for a moment, hiding. His whole body is taut, stretched and tense like a freshly-strung violin. Like he’d vibrate into sound if plucked.

“Come on,” Shane says, pulling Ryan up from the bed.  “You get in the shower, clean up, and come out when you can not yell. I’m going to brush my teeth and go deal with this.”

It seems that what happens in the cabin will not, after all, stay in the cabin.

*

When Shane emerges from the bedroom, TJ is sitting at the kitchen table, tapping out a little rhythm with one hand and staring down at the cat puzzle as if this is somehow the cats’ fault. Mark— _classic Mark_ —is standing at the sink, washing the dirty dishes they left in the sink last night. They both look shell-shocked, and Shane imagines he looks the same.

When he steps in the room they both stare at him.

“How did you even get here?” Shane asks. Might as well ease into it.

“We were worried,” TJ says, unsmiling. “We hadn’t heard from you since the storm, we thought maybe you were running out of food. Devon gave us the okay us to rent snowmobiles as soon as the roads out of Stowe were clear enough, which was early this morning.”

“We didn’t have service, and then we lost power for a while. I got a voicemail from you, but that was it.” Technically this could be untrue, because Shane hasn’t checked his phone since yesterday afternoon; for all he knows, they’ve been calling all morning.

“Kept warm, though,” Mark says mildly, drying off a plate with a rag.

Shane knows he has two apologies to make here, a personal one and a professional one, and the former is a lot easier than the latter.

“I’m sorry you saw that. I hope you won’t—please keep it to yourselves. It was important to Ryan that people not know, and I’m pretty sure he’s freaking out.” 

TJ purses his lips.

“Shane, man. What the _fuck_ were you thinking?”

Shane throws his hands up, because he doesn’t have a good answer. The real answer is that they _weren’t_ thinking, that it had ceased to feel like a work trip the moment TJ and Mark disappeared in the car with the main camera in tow. That the real world had disappeared, even if just for a couple of days, and all thoughts of consequences with it. But Shane doesn’t think TJ will consider “we didn’t give a shit” a good answer.

 “The day of the blizzard,” he says instead, “we were out in it. We went for a walk, we thought it wasn’t due for a couple of hours yet. We got lost. It was…bad, Teej. It was almost really bad.”

TJ doesn’t say anything, but he stops tapping on the table. Mark puts the plate down and leans against the counter, watching them back and forth like a tennis match.

“And then after, it just happened. The fear, and then the relief, and the snow. I don’t know.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” TJ says after a moment. “I’m not going to rat you out to Devon or the big bosses, but it can’t happen again. Like, in your own time, congratulations, I’ll throw you two a damn parade. I’ll officiate the fuckin’ wedding. But not on my shoots, man.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Shane says, and he tries not to sound bitter or regretful. “It’s not going to be an issue. It wasn’t ever going to go beyond this.”

Mark makes a little “hmph” noise of disbelief, which Shane pretends not to hear. 

Shane understands now why Ryan was so dead-set on this staying here in Vermont and never following them home. He’s in the habit of thinking of Unsolved as his and Ryan’s project, like they’re Bonnie and Clyde. He let himself forget about all the other people whose working days revolve around the show. It’s their show, his and Ryan’s, but it’s also TJ’s and Mark’s and Devon’s and the editing team’s, and all the way down the ladder. They have a responsibility to all these people.

“Is he going to be fine?” TJ asks, nodding in the direction of the bedroom. “Only we’ve got to get these snowmobiles back by five, and it’ll take a while.”

“After you slammed that door I saw his soul leave his body, so I don’t know.”

“We can give him a few more minutes,” Mark says, and his eyes when they meet Shane’s are kind. “He’s had a tough couple of days.”

TJ snorts.

“Yeah? From where I’m sitting he got paid to lie around doing puzzles and getting his dick sucked.”

“Well, from where I’m standing you guys got paid to hang out a ski resort drinking hot cocoa and snowmobiling, so maybe we call it even.”

Mark laughs softly, shaking his head. “Hey, man, I’m on your side here, but that’s nowhere near even.”

*

Ryan does join them a couple of minutes later, dressed and toweling his hair dry. He doesn’t look happy, and his eyes are red-rimmed, but he doesn’t look like he’s about to find a bridge to jump off of either. Shane thinks that’s about the best he could hope for.

“I’m all packed,” he says to the room, and then to Shane: “I packed your shit too.”

TJ clears his throat, opens his mouth to say something, and then closes it again. He shoots a panicky look over at Mark.

“Ryan, what TJ is trying and failing to say is that we’re sorry our timing was so shitty and that we saw something that was meant to be private, and we won’t tell anyone, and now we never have to talk about it ever again.”

Ryan nods and one hand comes up to scratch at his jaw, which is badly in need of a shave now. Shane catches his eye and gives a minute one-shouldered shrug. He knows this wasn’t what Ryan wanted, and he’s sorry about that.

He’s also experiencing culture shock. Having TJ and Mark here in the cabin—in _their cabin_ —is setting off sparks in his brain, twinges of anger they don’t deserve. A small part of him wants to fly to Chicago and escape all this, but a bigger part wants to usher them out the door, lock it behind them, and take Ryan back to bed.

He’s sorry to see it end, and he’s sorry to see it end like _this_. They should have had more time.

*

It’s a cold, slow trip back to Stowe on the snowmobiles, and then an awkward night the four of them share in Mark and TJ’s room at the Stowe Mountain Resort. They spend the evening taking advantage of the wi-fi; Shane checks his email and rebooks a new flight to Chicago for the next day, and Ryan calls Devon to make new travel arrangements and have a hushed, unhappy conversation about the budget they’ve massively blown for a video they weren’t even able to shoot.

Ryan sleeps facing the wall, his back to Shane, curled up in a tight little ball like he’s afraid he’ll be betrayed by his own limbs in the night.

The next morning, December 22, they drive the rental back to the Burlington airport on roads that are still a little treacherous. Shane’s flight to O’Hare leaves just before one, and the others’ flight to L.A. by way of Denver is set to take off at two-thirty. His gate’s on the way to theirs, so they all walk together and pick a quiet corner to eat a sandwich.

The airport’s packed with holiday travelers, probably as busy as the Burlington airport ever gets, and there aren’t a lot of seats. Shane finds a stretch of wall and slides his back down it to sit on the floor. He’s surprised when Ryan slides down next to him, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder.

Ryan tips his head back against the wall, eyes closed, knees tucked up against his chest and arm slung over them. A hickey pokes out from around his crew-neck. Shane thinks he’s trying to nap until he speaks, too low for anyone else to hear.

“What did TJ say to you yesterday? I’m trying to figure out if I’m going to get yelled at when I get back.”

“He said he wouldn’t tell Devon as long as I promised it wouldn’t happen on location again. He also said he’d officiate our wedding.”  

Ryan cracks an eye open at that to peek over at Shane. His lip twitches, as close to a smile as Shane’s seen since the previous morning.

“That’s generous of him, considering his retinas must have been seared.”

“Our Teej is a man of the world. I’m sure it takes more than a little friendly knob-slobbering to shock him.”

“Friendly—ugh. You’re disgusting.”

“That’s funny, because that’s not the feedback I was getting yesterday.”

That might be too much. They had, after all, agreed not to talk about it, and this definitely constitutes talking about it. But Ryan just smirks into his own forearm and Shane’s heart lifts. He doesn’t want to get on a plane for ten days and leave them on bad terms, a more extreme version of going to bed angry.

“Let’s talk when you get back, okay? I need to sort some stuff out, but…”

Shane nods, because Ryan’s expecting him to, but it strikes him as pointless. What is there to talk about? Ryan already made the important call, the one that mattered, when he decided whatever this was or could be wasn’t worth the complications.

Ryan pulls out his phone, finally charged and fully operational again, and fiddles around with it. A moment later, Shane’s own phone buzzes with a notification and he pulls it out.

It’s the fucking picture of [the cat puzzle](http://buffalogames.com/cats-sweet-shop-kittens-750-piece-jigsaw-puzzle/). As promised, Ryan’s posted it to Instagram and tagged himself, Shane, Mark, and TJ as the cats. The caption reads: _An eventful few days in a blizzard with these cool cats._

Shane likes the post, grinning even as he registers the lie. TJ and Mark must’ve checked right away as well, because he can hear Mark chuckling from a few rows away.

“Don’t tag me in your weird cabin shit!” TJ shouts over.

Comments from fans start to stream in, smiley faces with hearts for eyes and little cat faces. Shane stares again at the angelic, dumb kittens on the puzzle, at the sliver of his own hand that’s visible in the corner where he’d finished slotting in the final piece. Could that really have been just a few days ago? It might as well be another life.

Over the loudspeaker, they’re calling boarding for Shane’s flight to Chicago. He moves to push himself up. To his surprise and maybe also to Ryan’s, Ryan reaches out whip-fast and grabs his wrist, keeping him there.

“That’s my flight.”

“This is stupid, but. I’m kind of not ready for you to go.”

“Yeah,” Shane agrees. “But that’s my flight and I’ve got to be on it. I can’t reschedule it again.”

“Look, just. Don’t disappear on me this week. Text sometimes, okay? Like normal.”

He’s still got hold of Shane’s wrist, braced against the airport carpet where nobody can see. Shane can feel where his fingers are wrapped around him, the first time they’ve touched since yesterday. Shane had almost had enough time to get used to casual touches, but not quite, and the fingers on his skin are all he can focus on. He doesn’t know if this is part of their new normal or a final farewell to this strange outlier of a week.

“I won’t freeze you out if you won’t freeze me out. A little space, though, maybe.”

“Deal,” Ryan says. He uncurls his fingers from Shane’s wrist and watches as Shane pulls himself up to go to his gate. “Safe flight. See you in 2018.”

Shane doesn’t want to leave it like this. There are still things he wants to say. He knows that by the time he gets back from Chicago, Ryan will have gotten everything sorted and ordered: he’ll have figured out the budget, come up with a plan for a cheap replacement episode, and filed their time in the cabin neatly away in a folder he won’t open again. If there is a time for Shane to make a case for this, for _them_ , it’s right now.

But his flight is boarding, and Ryan is already looking back down at his phone, and Shane lets the moment pass. _Self-sabotage._

“See you in 2018.”

He shoulders his carry-on and walks away, leaving Ryan tucked up on the floor, running his hand over hideous airport carpet.

*****

**December 22/23, 2017**  
10:19 pm Pacific/12:19 am Central  
  
_Ryan:_ flight finally got in and it’s over 50 degrees here  
_Shane:_ Glad to hear it  
_Shane:_ It’s after midnight though, this is your official reminder that other time zones exist.  
_Ryan:_ this is your official reminder to bite me  
_Shane:_ Wanna take a look in the mirror and say that to me again?  
_Ryan:_ way harsh, tai

**December 25, 2017  
8:47 am Pacific/10:47 am Central**

_Ryan:_ hey man, been a few days. merry christmas, tell your fam hi from me.  
_Shane:_ Merry Christmas to you too! They say hi back.  
Ryan: [attachment: xmaspups.jpg] _[a photo of Ryan in his pjs, clutching a wriggling dachshund wearing a tiny elf hat under each arm]_  
Shane: Cute!  
_Ryan:_ why thank you  
_Shane:_ I meant Micki and Dori.

 **December 29, 2017**  
1:25 pm Pacific/3:25 pm Central  
  
_Ryan:_ brrrr  
_Shane:_ ???  
_Ryan:_ just a little chilly in this thread that’s all  
_Shane:_ I’m sorry.  
_Shane:_ I haven’t figured out how to go back to normal yet.  
_Shane:_ I’ll figure it out.  


**December 31, 2017  
2:13 pm Pacific/4:12 Central**

_Ryan:_ any big plans for NYE?  
_Shane:_ Game night with the fam and then drinks with a couple of friends who are in town. You?  
_Ryan:_ roland’s throwing a thing  & it’s sure to be a disaster, wish you were here  
_Shane:_ You know I like a good disaster.  
_Ryan:_ lucky for me

**December 31, 2017/January 1, 2018  
10:02 am Pacific/12:02 Central**

_Shane:_ Happy New Year, Ry-guy!  
_Ryan:_ aughhh no spoilers

**12:01 am Pacific/2:01 am Central**

_Ryan:_ HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!  
_Ryan:_ asleep already, old man??  
_Ryan:_ i had no one to kiss at midnight except roland’s fat elderly cat dumbledore, it was very sad  
_Ryan:_ i miss you.

**7:10 am Pacific/9:10 am Central**

Shane: I’m sorry to hear Dumbledore’s let himself go. Hope your hangover isn’t too miserable.  
Shane: I miss you too.

*

Shane rocks into work late on Wednesday the third of January. Two full weeks out of the office, first in Vermont and then in Chicago, have rendered it fluorescent and sterile and strange. Usually Shane doesn’t mind the open floor plan—he just plugs in, like most of them do, and shuts it out—but today he feels exposed as he slides into his desk chair.

There’s coffee in a travel cup sitting on his desk. It’s been sitting there long enough to cool a little, but Shane still gulps it gratefully.

At first he doesn’t even turn his computer on; he sits there, nursing his coffee and staring at the reflection of himself in the black screen, absorbing the post-holiday chatter around him. He takes a deep breath and logs in to his email.

Ryan gets back from the break room with a cup of coffee of his own. Shane isn’t sure what to expect; the handful of times they’d texted over the week had been weird, and it’s impossible to get a sense of tone over text anyway.

“Welcome back, dude. Good vacation?”

Ryan throws himself into his own chair and spins around to look at Shane.

“Not too bad,” Shane says. “Ate a lot of roast beast, hung some stockings by the ol’ chimney with care, went a-wassailing among the leaves so green. All the old standbys.”

“Nice jacket, by the way. Christmas present?”

Ryan scoots his chair close to pluck at the sleeve of Shane’s bomber, rubbing the corduroy fabric between his fingers, and suddenly it’s a lot of Ryan all at once, right up in his face early in the morning. He smells woodsy again, somehow crisp and spicy at once. Did he change his shampoo, or is Shane going to hallucinate pine and sugar maple on his skin forever?

Shane tears his attention away then, because he’s got an email in his inbox from Shasta in HR, a request that he swing by her office to sign some papers and have a chat at 4:30. Devon’s CC’d on the email. Shane’s stomach does a complicated flip.

“Are we in trouble? I’ve got an email from HR wanting a quick meeting.”

Ryan wrinkles up his nose. He uses the corner of Shane’s desk to push into a full 360-spin on his chair, scooting back to his own desk.

“Devon knows. We’re not in trouble, the show’s not in trouble, there’s just a form to sign. Something Legal wants. I signed it last week when I came in to do some cleanup on the Vermont shoot.”

Shane sighs.

“That lasted all of about ten minutes. I can’t believe Teej squealed, the Benedict Arnold asshole. I’ll book a conference room for tomorrow so we can brainstorm ways to get back at him.”

Ryan shrugs. Shane would have expected him to be more upset, but he doesn’t seem too perturbed that the list of people who know about their—indiscretion? Their cabin thing? Shane’s not even sure how to think about it yet, let alone how to talk about it with others—has expanded again. Maybe he’s resigned now, beaten down by a solid ten days of over-analyzing and anxiety-spiraling.

At four-thirty, after an unproductive day of catching up on email and making half-hearted notes on Ryan’s expense report, he heads over to Shasta’s office (HR has actual offices, with doors and everything) to find Devon there already.

“Hey, Shane,” she says, meeting his eye with a smile, tucking her bangs out of her eyes with a clip. “Good Christmas?”

“Not too bad,” he lies again.  Shasta’s shuffling papers around, and then she sets a form and a pen in front of him.

“This is a Disclosure of Intimate Relationship form,” she says. “Because neither of you is in a position of authority over the other it isn’t a problem, but Legal asks that we keep this on file for everybody’s protection. We’ll also ask that you keep it on your own time, no matter what the weather does.”

“We’ll continue booking rooms with two double beds whenever possible for shooting trips,” Devon adds. “What you do with them is your business, but from Buzzfeed’s perspective you’re using both beds unless the relationship is legally formalized, and then they’d loosen that particular policy.” 

Shane feels like either he’s two steps behind, or Devon and Shasta are working with bad information. He wonders what exactly TJ told them.

Shasta hands over the form, and Shane scans it. It says that he and Ryan are voluntarily self-disclosing a consensual intimate relationship that began on December 19 while on location for an Unsolved shoot, and then there’s space for his signature and the date below Ryan’s. Yeah, there’s clearly been a miscommunication here.

“I’m not sure I can sign this as it’s written,” Shane says. “There’s no…no relationship. We’re not dating or together or anything. It was something that happened and now it’s done.” He can’t bring himself to say _mistake_.

Devon shifts in her seat, but Shasta doesn’t seem phased.

“That doesn’t matter. It’s a formality, so the company knows it happened, you acknowledge that we know, and then whatever happens from there is your business. It protects you both and us from sexual harassment complaints.”

Shane signs.

Shasta gets up to scan and file the form, and Devon lays a hand on his arm.

“I know this is awkward, but it’s for the best,” she says. “I was surprised when Ryan came to me, but he was determined to make sure everything was above-board.”

For a minute Shane thinks he’s misheard her. He just sits and blinks at her while his brain catches up with his ears. And then the words sink in and his world is upended when he realizes: TJ didn’t snitch on them. TJ and Mark would have taken it to their graves.

It was Ryan who went to Devon, Ryan who initiated the uncomfortable conversation their bosses, _Ryan_ who pushed it through HR. It’s because of Ryan that there’s a piece of paper sitting in a filing cabinet that acknowledges what happened between them in their snowed-in cabin.

While Shane was back in Chicago stewing about how Ryan was going to shove it under the rug, and trying to figure out how to not care about that, Ryan was busy doing exactly the opposite. Making plans. Removing hurdles. Giving them _options_.

Zigging when Shane expects him to zag, again.

“So, uh, from the look on your face I’m guessing you should probably talk to him about that,” Devon says.

“He’s full of surprises, our guy.” Shane doesn’t know what to say. His body’s stuck here in this office, but all of the rest of him is back out in that fluorescent-lit nightmare finding Ryan and shoving him into a supply closet to yell at him or kiss him or both. 

“ _Your_ guy,” Devon corrects. “It says so right there on the form.”

*

In the end he doesn’t pull anybody into any closets, since he just signed something to the effect that he wouldn’t do that. He goes back to his desk, and Ryan’s there waiting for him, pretending to work. When Shane sits down again he peeks over right away.

“Pretty sneaky, Bergara,” Shane says. “With your it’s-too-complicateds and your what-about-the-shows. A classic misdirect.”

“I still think the original plan might have worked, but getting caught like that was—”

“Traumatic.”

“The worst. I didn’t want to get caught out, is all. Or have it get back to Devon the, the wrong way.”

“And you couldn’t have shot me a text? Like, hey Shane, just a real quick thing, I’m gonna tell our bosses all about how they—” he lowers his voice to a low hiss “— _paid us to fornicate in a cabin_ , text me back byeeeeeee.”

Ryan darts a nervous look around but there’s nobody at their bay of desks right now, nobody within earshot to hear them. Plenty of people still aren’t back from the holiday, and others have peaced out early.

“You weren’t very communicative last week.”

“We agreed on some space!”

“Come get dinner,” Ryan says, “and we can talk about this somewhere that isn’t here.”

Shane frowns at the segue, but it’s not like he’s getting work done anyway. This is going to chip away at him until they can deal with it.

“Yeah, okay, I could eat. Maybe burritos? Just let me—” he starts to shut his computer down.

Ryan rolls his eyes.

“No, like—come get dinner. _With me_. And we can talk about it at _dinner_. And then if we have to we can finish talking at _your place_.”

Shane realizes then that he’s not only two steps behind. He’s been lapped.

*

An hour later he’s on what he’s at least forty percent sure is a first date with Ryan Bergara, a human man who appears to not have any idea how to be on a date with another human man. It’s hard to be certain, because the signals are mixed.

Points in favor:

  * Ryan opens the passenger door of his car for Shane. Then he realizes what he’s doing, slams the door closed again before Shane can get in, and scurries around to the driver’s side like nothing weird has just happened.
  * Ryan takes them to somewhere that isn’t Chipotle but is in fact a proper restaurant, a Oaxacan joint he probably found on the Eater Heat Map at two in the morning when he should have been sleeping.
  * When they get there he’s got a _reservation_.
  * When the waiter asks whether this will be one check or two, Ryan says “one” without thinking. Then he backtracks and says “two.” Then he says “one” again. Then he looks at Shane, who tells the waiter apologetically, “Surprise us. Either way we’ll tip so well.”
  * Ryan’s foot touches his own under the table four times, not that Shane’s counting.



Points against:

  * Right after they get there, Ryan excuses himself by saying he has to “piss like a racehorse,” which doesn’t feel to Shane like a particularly date-y thing to say.
  * At least two of the four foot-touches are in fact _kicks_.
  * When Shane straight-up asks him if it’s a date, Ryan changes the subject to the Lakers’ chances for making the playoffs.



Shane allows Ryan to talk for three minutes and thirty seconds about the Lakers before cutting him off, which stretches the limits of his benevolence.

“Ryan. _Ryan_.”

Ryan trails off midway through a sentence about three-point shot percentages.

“I’m serious. What are we doing here?”

“We’re eating tlayuda.”

“Ryan, come on. I spent the world’s most pathetic Christmas vacation moping around and trying to convince myself that I didn’t care that we were what-happens-in-Vegas-ing the cabin. You were the one who decided that. Are you un-deciding it, and if so were you planning to clue me in at any point?”

Ryan shoves tlayuda in his mouth, and then points to his mouth like he can’t possibly answer while he’s chewing. Then he proceeds to chew the bite for at least thirty seconds, buying time.

Finally, he says, “Do you remember how I said I thought it might be a one-off? That I might get home and not…want that?”

Of course Shane remembers. Shane remembers acutely. It’s like asking someone if they remember that one time they were on safari having a grand old time until they got mauled by that lion.

“Well,” Ryan goes on, “plot twist: I guess I still do, a lot. This is me cluing you in. I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear, but it’s because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

He says it in such a nonchalant way that Shane can tell how very not nonchalant he actually feels about it, how much thinking he must have done about this over the last ten days. Ryan simply isn’t a casual, roll-with-it sort of person. He cares a lot what other people think about him, and about what is expected from him, and he sticks close to that unless it’s something essential he can’t do without

Shane supposes that makes him a thing Ryan can’t do without. A thing worth wading through all that discomfort and treacherous uncertainty for.  

“It will still be tricky,” Shane warns. “For all the reasons we know about, and some we haven’t even thought of yet.”

Even as he says it, his heart is singing. The tlayuda tastes amazing, but he has to put it down because his mouth is too dry to chew properly.

“I missed you a lot. It was only a week and a couple of days, but I—I spent the whole time wishing we were still back in that stupid cabin with nothing to do but play at Scrabble and, and.”

“And _and_ ,” Shane agrees. “But we can’t drop our lives and relocate permanently to a secluded cabin. That’s not how life works, unless you’re considering life as a sexy hermit who supports me by whittling and shirtless furniture-making. Which, by the way, I am open to.”

Ryan’s smile goes wry despite Shane’s flippancy, turned down at the edges. His thoughts must have been running parallel to Shane’s this last week, even separated as they have been by two thousand miles. Shane can’t get over the degree to which he’s underestimated this man sitting across the table from him.

“No, I know.”

“It’ll be different here.”

“Yeah. And I’m not ready to…” Ryan trails off. “I can’t promise I’ll be ready to tell people for, I don’t know. For a while.”

And he looks truly regretful about that, like he wishes he were different. Shane knows he’ll need that from Ryan, eventually; he’ll need to be able to tell his parents and his brother and his closest friends. He’ll want Ryan to meet them. He’ll want their coworkers to know. But there’s no reason they can’t take their time.

“It’s not like I know what I’m doing either,” Shane says. “We can figure it out together, at whatever pace we want, and thanks to you we can do it without getting fired. Fuck everything else.”

Ryan’s foot finds his under the table again, and runs up his calf and back down to hook around his ankle. That, Shane’s positive, was _not_ a kick.

Yeah, he’s ready to call this one a date.

“I don’t usually bother with New Year’s resolutions,” Ryan says. “But this year I made one about trying to be braver. And about caring less what—what people say, and making myself happier. So here goes.”

“Well.” Shane doesn’t know what to say to that, so he lets himself turn it into a joke. He knows that Ryan will understand that he thinks it’s the opposite of funny. “I can’t tell you how touched I am that my dick has spurred you to such personal growth.  If it turns out I can fuck the fear of ghosts out of you, I’m going to have to brag to some people about that.”

Ryan chokes into his glass, coughing a spray of horchata everywhere. He comes up with wide eyes and a little trace of it on his lip, all milk and foam, and Shane’s ready to get out of here any time.  

*

Ryan drives him home. When they get to Shane’s apartment complex he pulls into a space and puts the car in park, but leaves it running.  He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for Shane to either ask or not ask.

Shane isn’t sure what the done thing is here; whether Ryan saying he wants to take things slow in public also means he wants to take them slow in private. There’s a certain first-flush-of-romance appeal to giving Ryan a quick, flurried kiss and going up to his apartment alone to listen to Belle & Sebastian and moon around.

On the other hand, there is also substantial appeal to not doing that.

“Do you want to come up?”

He can’t pretend that this is just someone he’s seeing, can’t treat Ryan like he’d treat a new person in his life. This is Ryan, who knows him. Ryan, who’s already seen him cry and yell; throw up and laugh until he’s almost peed himself; pick fights and sweat and come. He could be coy about it, but he wouldn’t be fooling anyone.

“God yes,” Ryan says, not bothering to hide his eagerness either. He turns off the engine with a decisive twist of the wrist.

“I’m afraid it won’t be up to your usual standards,” Shane says. “No roaring fireplace. No romantic snowfall.  Just me.”

“Romantic?” Ryan scoffs, hauling himself out of the car. “We almost fuckin’ died. You’ll do.”

When he joins Shane on the other side he gives him a gentle hip-check and adjusts his pace to keep up with Shane’s long strides as they head for the stairs.

Shane chances a glance over. He’s ready to find out what it means to make space for this in his real life. The cabin was their kick in the ass, their trial run. What he wants now isn’t any of the filmy rom-com fantasy stuff, nice as it was. He wants to get Ryan in his real bed in his real bedroom in his real apartment. He wants to find out what Ryan looks like in the morning, L.A. sunshine streaming through the windows.

At the top of the stairs, at the door of his apartment, Shane’s fiddling with his keys when Ryan presses him up against the door. Ryan’s mouth is on his before he even realizes what’s happening, frantic, cinnamon-hot from the horchata. The New Year’s kiss at midnight they didn’t get to have, separated as they were by miles and time zones and misunderstandings.

His arms come up to bracket Shane’s head on either side, keeping him against the door as he presses in from thighs to chest. Shane doesn’t have enough hands for everything he wants. He lets his keyring drop to the ground and grabs Ryan at the hip and lower back, pulling him in tight and feeling the muscles move under fabric.

Ryan pulls back to breathe. He rests his forehead on Shane’s shoulder and laughs like he’s relieved.

“You do realize we’re in public, right?” Shane asks.

“Barely. It’s dark. I told you, I _missed_ you.”

“Better than Roland’s fat elderly cat, then?”

Shane had fallen into Christmas bracing for the end of something and bargaining for more time. Now the new year is stretched out in front of him, fresh as clean sheets and unfolding with possibilities. His wrists throb with the joy of it.

“The apartment’s kind of a mess,” he prefaces, even though Ryan has seen his apartment a hundred times and he knows that already.

“No shit,” Ryan breathes, “open the fuckin’ door.”

Then he drops down to a kneel at Shane’s feet, rummaging for the keys on the ground, and Shane’s fresh out of room in his head for thinking or worrying or anything but need. Ryan presses the keys into his palm and a hand to Shane’s thigh, inches shy of where he wants it, and then he’s fumbling again with the lock and ushering Ryan through the threshold.

They’ve got nothing but time.


End file.
